
Class JlPS_ijJn.3_ 
Book_J!_Z_Cr_ 



Other Books by the Same Author : 

' ' Journeys to Bagdad ' ' 
Third printing. 

There's Pippins and Cheese to Come " 
Second printing. 



Chimney-Pot Papers. 







^ ^ ^ ^ ^ Q 






Copyright, 1919, by 
Yale University Press. 



Publisher's Note: 

The Yale University Press makes grateful 
acknowledgment to the Editors of the 
Unpopular Review and The Century Maga- 
zine for permission to include in the 
present volume, essays of which they were 
the original publishers. 



©CI.A515434 

MAY -0 I'did 



^v, 



>o 1 



y 



To Minerva, my Wife. 



Contents. ^ 

I. The Chimney-Pots 11 

II. The Quest of the Lost Digamma . 19 

III. On a Rainy Morning"?^ o^oT %0d.V.*jA35 

IV. "1917" \ . . 43 

V. On Going Afoot 47 

VI. On Livelihoods ....:. 68 

VII. The Tread of the Friendly Giants . 79 

VIII. On Spending a Holiday .... 89 

IX. Runaway Studies 109 

X. On Turning into Forty X. \ V v. c» ^ "^ 4-117 

XI. On the Difference between Wit and 

Humor 128 

XII. On Going to a Party X . ^ l^^ f .^ i 136 

XIII. On a Pair of Leather Suspenders . 146 

XIV. Boots for Runaways T 't^ "^ ^"^"^ 159 

XV. On Hanging a Stocking at Christ- 
mas ci. c^oA". ^. V:^VK. . 169 



4 



The Chimney-Pots. 

MY windows look across the roofs of the 
crowded city and my thoughts often take 
their suggestion from the life that is mani- 
fest at my neighbors' windows and on these roofs. 

Across the way, one story lower than our own, 
there dwells "with his subsidiary parents" a little lad 
who has been ill for several weeks. After his house- 
hold is up and dressed I regularly discover him in 
bed, with his books and toys piled about him. Some- 
times his knees are raised to form a snowy mountain, 
and he leads his paper soldiers up the slope. Some- 
times his kitten romps across the coverlet and pounces 
on his wriggling toes ; and again sleeps on the sunny 
window-sill. His book, by his rapt attention, must 
deal with far-off islands and with waving cocoa- 
nut trees. Lately I have observed that a yellow 
drink is brought to him in the afternoon — a delicious 
blend of eggs and milk — and by the zest with which 
he licks the remainder from his lips, it is a prime 
favorite of his. In these last few days, however, I 
have seen the lad's nose flat and eager on the window, 
and I know that he is convalescent. 

At another set of windows — now that the days are 
growing short and there is need of lights — I see 
in shadowgraph against the curtains an occasional 



1'2 CHIMNEY-POT PAPERS 

domestic drama. Tonight, by the appearance of 
hurry and the shifting of garments, I surmise that 
there is preparation for a party. Presently, when 
the upstairs lights have disappeared, I shall see these 
folk below, issuing from their door in glossy raiment. 
My dear sir and madame, I wish you an agreeable 
dinner and — if your tooth resembles mine — ice-cream 
for dessert. 

The window of a kitchen, also, is opposite, and I 
often look on savory messes as they ripen on the fire — 
a stirring with a long iron spoon. This spoon is of 
such unusual length that even if one supped with the 
devil (surely the fearful adage cannot apply to our 
quiet street) he might lift his food in safety from the 
common pot. 

A good many stories lower there is a bit of roof 
that is set with wicker furniture and a row of gay 
plants along the gutter. Here every afternoon 
exactly at six — the roof being then in shadow — a man 
appears and reads his evening paper. Later his wife 
joins him and they eat their supper from a tray. 
They are sunk almost in a well of buildings which, 
like the hedge of a fairy garden, shuts them from all 
contact with the world. And here they sit when the 
tray has been removed. The twilight falls early at 
their level and, like cottagers in a valley, they watch 
the daylight that still gilds the peaks above them. 

There is another of these out-of-door rooms above 
me on a higher building. From my lower level I can 



THE CHIMNEY-POTS IS 

see the bright canvas and the side of the trellis that 
supports it. Here, doubtless, in the cool breeze of 
these summer evenings, honest folk sip their coffee 
and watch the lights start across the city. 

Thus, all around, I have glimpses of my neigh- 
bors — a form against the curtains — a group, in the 
season, around the fire — the week's darning in a 
rocker — an early nose sniffing at the open window 
the morning airs. 

But it is these roofs themselves that are the general 
prospect. 

Close at hand are graveled surfaces with spouts 
and whirling vents and chimneys. Here are posts 
and lines for washing, and a scuttle from which once 
a week a laundress pops her head. Although her 
coming is timed to the very hour — almost to the 
minute — yet when the scuttle stirs it is with an ap- 
pearance of mystery, as if one of the forty thieves 
were below, boosting at the rocks that guard his cave. 
But the laundress is of so unromantic and jouncing 
a figure that I abandon the fancy when no more than 
her shoulders are above the scuttle. She is, however, 
an amiable creature and, if the wind is right, I hear 
her singing at her task. When clothespins fill her 
mouth, she experiments with popular tunes. One 
of these wooden bipeds once slipped inside and nearly 
strangled her. 

In the distance, on the taller buildings, water tanks 
are lifted against the sky. They are perched aloft 



U CHIMNEY-POT PAPERS 

on three fingers, as it were, as if the buildings were 
just won to prohibition and held up their water cups 
in the first excitement of a novice to pledge the cause. 
Let hard liquor crouch and tremble in its rathskeller 
below the sidewalk! In the basement let musty kegs 
roll and gurgle with hopeless fear! Der Tag! The 
roof, the triumphant roof, has gone dry. 

This range of buildings with water tanks and 
towers stops my gaze to the North. There is a 
crowded world beyond — rolling valleys of human- 
ity — the heights of Harlem — but although my win- 
dows stand on tiptoe, they may not discover these 
distant scenes. 

On summer days these roofs burn in the sun and 
spirals of heat arise. Tar flows from the joints in 
the tin. Tar and the adder — is it not a bright day 
that brings them forth? Now washing hangs limp 
upon the line. There is no frisk in undergarments. 
These stockings that hang shriveled and anaemic — 
can it be possible that they once trotted to a lively 
tune, or that a lifted skirt upon a crosswalk drew the 
eye? The very spouts and chimneys droop in the 
heavy sunlight. All the spinning vents are still. On 
these roofs, as on a steaming altar, August celebrates 
its hot midsummer rites. 

But in winter, when the wind is up, the roofs show 
another aspect. The storm, in frayed and cloudy 
garment, now plunges across the city. It snaps 



THE CHIMNEY-POTS 15 

its boisterous fingers. It pipes a song to sum- 
mon rowdy companions off the sea. The whirling 
vents hum shrilly to the tune. And the tempests are 
roused, and the windy creatures of the hills make 
answer. The towers — even the nearer buildings — are 
obscured. The sky is gray with rain. Smoke is torn 
from the chimneys. Down below let a fire be snug 
upon the hearth and let warm folk sit and toast their 
feet! Let shadows romp upon the walls! Let the 
andirons wink at the sleepy cat! Cream or lemon, 
two lumps or one. Here aloft is brisker business. 
There is storm upon the roof. The tempest holds a 
carnival. And the winds pounce upon the smoke as 
it issues from the chimney-pots and wring it by the 
neck as they bear it off. 

And sometimes it seems that these roofs represent 
youth, and its purpose, its ambition and adventure. 
For, from of old, have not poets lived in garrets? 
And are not all poets young even if their beards are 
white? Round and round the poet climbs, up these 
bare creaking flights to the very top. There is a stove 
to be lighted — unless the woodbox fails — a sloping 
ceiling and a window huddled to the floor. The poet's 
fingers may be numb. Although the inkpot be full, 
his stomach may be empty. And yet from this win- 
dow, lately, a poem was cast upward to the moon. 
And youth and truth still rhyme in these upper rooms. 
Linda's voice is still the music of a sonnet. Still do 



16 CHIMNEY-POT PAPERS 



the roses fade, and love is always like the constant 
stars. And once, this!— surely from a garret: 

When I behold, upon the night's starr'd face, 

Huge cloudy symbols of a high romance. 

And think that I may never live to trace 

Their shadows, with the magic hand of chance 

Poor starved wretches are we who live softly in the 
lower stories, although we are fat of body. 

If a mighty pair of shears were to clip the city 
somewhere below these windy gutters would there not 
be a dearth of poems in the spring? Who then 
would be left to note the changing colors of the twi- 
light and the peaceful transit of the stars? Would 
gray beech trees in the winter find a voice? Would 
there still be a song of water and of wind? Who 
would catch the rhythm of the waves and the wheat 
fields in the breeze? What lilts and melodies would 
vanish from the world! How stale and flat the city 
without its roofs! 

But it is at night that these roofs show best. Then, 
as below a philosopher in his tower, the city spreads 
its web of streets, and its lights gleam in answer to 
the lights above. Galileo in his tower— Teufels- 
drockh at his far-seeing attic window — saw this 
glistening pageantry and had thoughts unutterable. 
In this darkness these roofs are the true suburb of 
the world— the outpost— the pleasant edge of our 
human earth turned up toward the barren moon. 



THE CHIMNEY-POTS 17 

Chimneys stand as sentinels on the border of the sky. 
Pointed towers mark the passage of the stars. Great 
buildings are the cliffs on the shores of night. A sky- 
light shows as a pleasant signal to guide the wander- 
ing skipper of the moon. 



The Quest of the Lost Digamma. 

MANY years ago there was a club of college 
undergraduates which called itself the Lost 
Digamma. The digamma, I am informed, 
is a letter that was lost in prehistoric times from the 
Greek alphabet. A prudent alphabet would have 
offered a reward at once and would have beaten up 
the bushes all about, but evidently these remedies were 
neglected. As the years went on the other letters 
gradually assumed its duties. The philological 
chores, so to speak, night and morning, that had once 
fallen to the digamma, they took upon themselves, 
until the very name of the letter was all but lost. 

Those who are practiced in such matters — ^humped 
men who blink with learning — claim to discover evi- 
dence of the letter now and then in their reading. 
Perhaps the missing letter still gives a false quantity 
to a vowel or shifts an accent. It is remembered, as 
it were, by its vacant chair. Or rather, like a ghost 
it haunts a word, rattling a warning lest we dis- 
arrange a syllable. Its absence, however, in the flesh, 
despite the lapse of time — for it went off long ago 
when the mastodon still wandered on the pleasant 
upland — its continued absence vexes the learned. 
They scan ancient texts for an improper syllable and 
mark the time upon their brown old fingers, if pos- 



^0 CHIMNEY-POT PAPERS 

sibly a jolting measure may offer them a clue. Al- 
though it must appear that the digamma — if it yet 
rambles alive somewhere beneath the moon — ^has by 
this time grown a beard and is lost beyond recognition, 
still old gentlemen meet weekly and read papers to 
one another on the progress of the search. Like the 
old woman of the story they still keep a light burning 
in their study windows against the wanderer's return. 

Now it happened once that a group of under- 
graduates, stirred to sympathy beyond the common 
usage of the classroom, formed themselves into a club 
to aid in the search. It is not recorded that they were 
the deepest students in the class, yet mark their zeal! 
On a rumor arising from the chairman that the pres- 
ence of the lost digamma was suspected the group 
rushed together of an evening, for there was an in- 
stinct that the digamma, like the raccoon, was easiest 
trapped at night. To stay their stomachs against a 
protracted search, for their colloquies sat late, they 
ordered a plentiful dinner to be placed before them. 
Also, on the happy chance that success might crown 
the night, a row of stout Tobies was set upon the 
board. If the prodigal lurked without and his 
vagrant nose were seen at last upon the window, then 
musty liquor, from a Toby's three-cornered hat, 
would be a fitting pledge for his return. 

I do not know to a certainty the place of these 
meetings, but I choose to fancy that it was an upper 
room in a modest restaurant that went by the name 



THE QUEST OF THE LOST DIG AM MA n 

of Mory's — not the modern Mory's that affects the 
manners of a club, but the original Temple Bar, 
remembered justly for its brown ale and golden 
bucks. 

There was, of course, a choice of places where the 
Lost Digamma might have pushed its search. Waiv- 
ing Billy's and the meaner joints conferred on fresh- 
men, there was, to be sure, the scholastic murk of 
Traeger's — one room especially at the rear with steins 
around the walls. There was Heublein's, also. Even 
the Tontine might rouse a student. But I choose to 
consider that Mory's was the place. 

Never elsewhere has cheese spluttered on toast with 
such hot delight. Never have such fair round eggs 
perched upon the top. The hen who laid the golden 
^^'g — for it could be none other than she who worked 
the miracle at Mory's — ^must have clucked like a brag- 
gart when the smoking dish came in. The dullest 
nose, even if it had drowsed like a Stoic through the 
day, perked and quivered when the breath came off 
the kitchen. Ears that before had never wiggled to 
the loudest noise came flapping forward when the 
door was opened. Or maybe in those days your 
wealth, huddled closely through the week, stretched 
on Saturday night to a mutton chop with bacon on 
the side. This chop, named of the southern downs, 
was so big that it curled like an anchovy to get upon 
the plate. The sheep that bore it across the grassy 
moors must have out-topped the horse. The hills 



CHIMNEY-POT PAPERS 



must have shaken beneath his tread. With what 
eagerness you squared your lean elbows for the feast, 
with knife and fork turned upwards in your fists! 

But chops in these modern days are retrograde. 
Sheep have fallen to a decadent race. Cheese has lost 
its cunning. Someone, alas, as the story says, has 
killed the hen that laid the golden egg, Mory's is 
sunk and gone. Its faded prints of the Old Brick 
Row, its tables carved with students' names, its brown 
Tobies in their three-cornered hats, the brasses of the 
tiny bar, the rickety rooms themselves — these rise 
from the past like genial ghosts and beckon us 
toward pleasant memories. 

Such was the zeal in those older days which the 
members of the Lost Digamma spent upon their quest 
that belated pedestrians — if the legend of the district 
be believed — have stopped upon the curb and have 
inquired the meaning of the glad shouts that issued 
from the upper windows, and they have gone off 
marveling at the enthusiasm attendant on this high 
endeavor. It is rumored that once when the excite- 
ment of the chase had gone to an unusual height and 
the students were beating their Tobies on the table, 
one of them, a fellow of uncommon ardor, lunging 
forward from his chair, got salt upon the creature's 
tail. The exploit overturned the table and so rocked 
the house that Louis, who was the guardian of the 
place, put his nose above the stairs and cooled the 
meeting. Had it not been for his interference — he 



THE QUEST OF THE LOST DIG AM MA 23 

was a good-natured fellow but unacquainted with the 
frenzy that marks the scholar — the lost digamma 
might have been trapped, to the lasting glory of the 
college. 

As to the further progress of the club I am not 
informed. Doubtless it ran an honorable course and 
passed on from class to class the tradition of its high 
ambition, but never again was the lost digamma so 
nearly in its grasp. If it still meets upon its mid- 
night labors, a toothless member boasts of that night 
of its topmost glory, and those who have gathered to 
his words rap their stale unprofitable mugs upon the 
table. 

It would be unjust to assume that you are so poor 
a student as myself. Doubtless you are a scholar and 
can discourse deeply of the older centuries. You 
know the ancient works of Tweedledum and can dis- 
tinguish to a hair's breadth 'twixt him and Tweedle- 
dee. Learning is candy on your tooth. Perhaps you 
stroke your sagacious beard and give a nimble reason 
for the lightning. To you the hills have whispered 
how they came, and the streams their purpose and 
ambition. You have studied the first shrinkage of 
the earth when the plains wrinkled and broke into 
mountain peaks. The mystery of the stars is to you 
as familiar as your garter. If such depth is yours, 
I am content to sit before you like a bucket below 
a tap. 



CHIMNEY-POT PAPERS 



At your banquet I sit as a poor relation. If the 
viands hold, I fork a cold morsel from your dish. . . . 

But modesty must not gag me. I do myself some- 
what lean towards knowledge. I run to a dictionary 
on a disputed word, and I point my inquiring nose 
upon the page like a careful schoolman. On a spurt 
I pry into an uncertain date, but I lack the persever- 
ance and the wakefulness for sustained endeavor. To 
repair my infirmity, I frequently go among those of 
steadier application, if haply their devotion may 
prove contagious. It was but lately that I dined with 
a group of the Cognoscenti. There were light words 
at first, as when a juggler carelessly tosses up a ball 
or two just to try his hand before he displays his 
genius — a jest or two, into which I entered as an 
equal. In these shallow moments we waded through 
our soup. But we had hardly got beyond the fish 
when the company plunged into greater depth. I 
soon discovered that I was among persons skilled in 
those economic and social studies that now most stir 
us. My neighbor on the left offered to gossip with 
me on the latest evaluations and eventuations — for 
such were her pleasing words — in the department of 
knowledge dearest to her. While I was still fumbling 
for a response, my neighbor on the right, abandoning 
her meat, informed me of the progress of a survey of 
charitable organizations that was then under way. 
By mischance, however, while flipping up the salad 
on my fork, I dropped a morsel on the cloth, and I 



THE QUEST OF THE LOST BIG AM MA 25 

was so intent in manoeuvring my plates and spoons 
to cover up the speck, that I lost a good part of her 
improving discourse. 

I was still, however, making a tolerable pretense 
of attention, when a learned person across the table 
was sharp enough to see that I was a novice in the 
gathering. For my improvement, therefore, he fixed 
his great round glasses in my direction. In my con- 
fusion they seemed burning lenses hotly focused on 
me. Under such a glare, he thought, my tender 
sprouts of knowledge must spring up to full blossom. 

When he had my attention, he proceeded to lay 
out the dinner into calories, which I now discovered 
to be a kind of heat or nutritive unit. He cast his 
appraisal on the meat and vegetables, and turned an 
ear toward the pantry door if by chance he might 
catch a hint of the dessert for his estimate, but by this 
time, being overwrought, I gave up all pretense, and 
put my coarse attention on my plate. 

Sometimes I fall on better luck. It was but yester- 
day that I sat waiting lor a book in the Public 
Library, when a young woman came and sat beside 
me on the common bench. Immediately she opened 
a monstrous note-book, and fell to studying it. I had 
myself been reading, but I had held my book at a 
stingy angle against the spying of my neighbors. As 
the young woman was of a more open nature, she laid 
hers out flat. It is my weakness to pry upon an- 
other's book. Especially if it is old and worn — a 



CHIMNEY-POT PAPERS 



musty history or an essay from the past — I squirm 
and edge myself until I can follow the reader's thumb. 

At the top of each page she had written the title 
of a book, with a space below for comment, now well 
filled. There were a hundred of these titles, and all 
of them concerned John Paul Jones. She busied her- 
self scratching and amending her notes. The whole 
was thrown into such a snarl of interlineation, was so 
disfigured with revision, and the writing so started 
up the margins to get breath at the top, that I won- 
dered how she could possibly bring a straight narra- 
tive out of the confusion. Yet here was a book 
growing up beneath my very nose. If in a year's 
time — or perhaps in a six-month, if the manuscript 
is not hawked too long among publishers — if when 
again the nights are raw, a new biography of John 
Paul Jones appears, and you cut its leaves while your 
legs are stretched upon the hearth, I bid you to recog- 
nize as its author my companion on the bench. Al- 
though she did not have beauty to rouse a bachelor, 
yet she had an agreeable face and, if a soft white 
collar of pleasing fashion be evidence, she put more 
than a scholar's care upon her dress. 

I am not entirely a novice in a library. Once I 
gained admittance to the Reading Room of the Brit- 
ish Museum — no light task even before the war. 
This was the manner of it. First, I went among the 
policemen who frequent the outer corridors, and in- 
quired for a certain office which I had been told con- 



THE QUEST OF THE LOST DIGAMMA 27 

trolled its affairs. The third policeman had heard of 
it and sent me off with directions. Presently I went 
through an obscure doorway, traversed a mean hall 
with a dirty gas-jet at the turn and came before a 
wicket. A dark man with the blood of a Spanish 
inquisitor asked my business. I told him I was a poor 
student, without taint or heresy, who sought knowl- 
edge. He stroked his chin as though it were a 
monstrous improbability. He looked me up and 
down, but this might have been merely a secular in- 
quiry on the chance that I carried explosives. He 
then dipped his pen in an ancient well (it was from 
such a dusty fount that the warrant for Saint Barthol- 
omew went forth), then bidding me be careful in my 
answers, he cocked his head and shut his less sus- 
picious eye lest it yield to mercy. 

He asked my name in full, middle name and all — 
as though villainy might lurk in an initial — my hotel, 
my length of stay in London, my residence in 
America, my occupation, the titles of the books I 
sought. When he had done, I offered him my age 
and my weakness for French pastry, in order that 
material for a monograph might be at hand if at last 
I came to fame, but he silenced me with his cold eye. 
He now thrust a pamphlet in my hands, and told me 
to sit alongside and read it. It contained the rules 
that govern the use of the Reading Room. It was 
eight pages long, and intolerably dry, and towards 
the end I nodded. Awaking with a start, I was about 



^8 CHIMNEY-POT PAPERS 

to hold up my hands for the adjustment of the thumb 
screws — for I had fallen on a nightmare — when he 
softened. The Imperial Government was now pleased 
to admit me to the Reading Room for such knowl- 
edge as might lie in my capacity. 

The Reading Room is used chiefly by authors, 
gray fellows mostly, dried and wrinkled scholars who 
come here to pilfer innocently from antiquity. 
Among these musty memorial shelves, if anywhere, 
it would seem that the dusty padding feet of the lost 
diganmia might be heard. In this room, perhaps, 
Christian Mentzelius was at work when he heard the 
book-worm flap its wings. 

Here sit the scholars at great desks with ingenious 
shelves and racks, and they write all day and copy 
excerpts from the older authors. If one of them 
hesitates and seems to chew upon his pencil, it is but 
indecision whether Hume or Buckle will weigh 
heavier on his page. Or if one of them looks up 
from his desk in a blurred near-sighted manner, it is 
because his eyes have been so stretched upon the dis- 
tant centuries, that they can hardly focus on a room. 
If a scholar chances to sneeze because of the infection, 
let it be his consolation that the dust arises from the 
most ancient and respected authors! Pages move 
silently about with tall dingy tomes in their arms. 
Other tomes, whose use is past, they bear off to the 
shades below. 

I am told that once in a long time a student of 



THE QUEST OF THE LOST DIGAMMA 29 

fresher complexion gets in — a novitiate with the first 
scholastic down upon his cheek — a tender stripling 
on his first high quest — a broth of a boy barely off his 
primer — but no sooner is he set than he feels unpleas- 
antly conspicuous among his elders. Most of these 
youth bolt, offering to the doorman as a pretext some 
neglect — a forgotten mission at a book-stall — an 
errand with a tailor. Even those few who remain 
because of the greater passion for their studies, find 
it to their comfort to break their condition. Either 
they put on glasses or they affect a limp. I know one 
persistent youth who was so consumed with desire 
for history, yet so modest against exposure, that he 
bargained with a beggar for his crutch. It was, how- 
ever, the rascal's only livelihood. This crutch and 
his piteous whimper had worked so profitably on the 
crowd that, in consequence, its price fell beyond the 
student's purse. My friend, therefore, practiced a 
palsy until, being perfect in the part, he could take 
his seat without notice or embarrassment. Alas, the 
need of these pretenses is short. Such is the contagion 
of the place — a breath from Egypt comes up from the 
lower stacks — that a youth's appearance, like a dyer's 
hand, is soon subdued to what it works in. In a 
month or so a general dust has settled on him. Too 
often learning is a Rip Van Winkle's flagon. 

On a rare occasion I have myself been a student, 
and have plied my book with diligence. Not long 
ago I spent a week of agreeable days reading the 



30 CHIMNEY-POT PAPERS 

many versions of Shakespeare that were played from 
the Restoration through the eighteenth century. 
They are well known to scholars, but the general 
reader is perhaps unfamiliar how Shakespeare was 
perverted. From this material I thought that I might 
lay out an instructive paper; how, for example, the 
whirling passion of Lear was once wrought to soft 
and pleasant uses for a holiday. Cordelia is rescued 
from the villains by the hero Kent, who cries out in 
a transport, "Come to my arms, thou loveliest, best 
of women!" The scene is laid in the woods, but as 
night comes on, Cordelia's old nurse appears. A 
scandal is averted. Whereupon Kent marries Cor- 
delia, and they reign happily ever afterward. As 
for Lear, he advances into a gentle convalescence. 
Before the week is out he will be sunning himself on 
the bench beneath his pear tree and babbling of his 
early days. 

There were extra witches in Macbeth. Romeo and 
Juliet lived and the quarreling families were united. 
Desdemona remained un-smothered to the end. 
There was one stout author — but here I trust to 
memory — who even attempted to rescue Hamlet and 
to substitute for the distant rolling of the drum of 
Fortinbras, the pipes and timbrels of his happy wed- 
ding. There is yet to be made a lively paper of these 
Shakespeare tinkers of the eighteenth century. 

And then John Timbs was to have been my text, 
who was an antiquary of the nineteenth century. I 



THE QUEST OF THE LOST DIGAMMA 31 

had come frequently on his books. They are seldom 
found in first-hand shops. More appropriately they 
are offered where the older books are sold — where 
there are racks before the door for the rakings of the 
place, and inside an ancient smell of leather. If there 
are barrels in the basement, stocked and overflowing, 
it is sure that a volume of Timbs is upon the premises. 

I visited the Public Library and asked a sharp- 
nosed person how I might best learn about John 
Timbs. I followed the direction of his wagging 
thumb. The accounts of the encyclopedias are 
meager, a date of birth and of death, a few facts of 
residence, the titles of his hundred and fifty books, 
and little more. Some neglect him entirely ; skipping 
lightly from Timbrel to Timbuctoo. Indeed, Tim- 
buctoo turned up so often that even against my inten- 
tion I came to a knowledge of the place. It lies 
against the desert and exports ostrich feathers, gums, 
salts and kola-nuts. Nor are timbrels to be scorned. 
They were used — I quote precisely — "by David when 
he danced before the ark." Surely not Noah's ark! 
I must brush up on David. 

Timbs is matter for an engaging paper. His pas- 
sion was London. He had a fling at other subjects — 
a dozen books or so — but his graver hours were given 
to the study of London. There is hardly a park or 
square or street, palace, theatre or tavern that did not 
yield its secrets to him. Here and there an upstart 
building, too new for legend, may have had ho gossip 



32 CHIMNEY-POT PAPERS 

for him, but all others John Timbs knew, and the 
personages who lived in them. And he knew whether 
they were of sour temper, whether they were rich or 
poor, and if poor, what shifts and pretenses they 
practiced. He knew the windows of the town where 
the beaux commonly ogled the passing beauties. He 
knew the chatter of the theatres and of society. He 
traced the walls of the old city, and explored the 
lanes. Unless I am much mistaken, there is not a 
fellow of the Dunciad to whom he has not assigned a 
house. Nor is any man of deeper knowledge of the 
clubs and coffee-houses and taverns. One would say 
that he had sat at Will's with Dryden, and that he 
had gone to Button's arm in arm with Addison. 
Did Goldsmith journey to his tailor for a plum- 
colored suit, you may be sure that Timbs tagged him 
at the elbow. If Sam Johnson sat at the Mitre or 
Marlowe caroused in Deptford, Timbs was of the 
company. There has scarcely been a play acted in 
London since the days of Burbage which Timbs did 
not chronicle. 

But presently I gave up the study of John Timbs. 
Although I had accumulated interesting facts about 
him, and had got so far as to lay out several amusing 
paragraphs, still I could not fit them together to an 
agreeable result. It was as though I could blow a 
melodious C upon a horn, and lower down, after 
preparation, a dulcet G, but failed to make a tune of 
them. 



THE QUEST OF THE LOST DIG AM MA 33 

But although my studies so far have been unsuc- 
cessful, doubtless I shall persist. Even now I have 
several topics in mind that may yet serve for pleasant 
papers. If I fail, it will be my comfort that others 
far better than myself achieve but a half success. 
Although the digamma escapes our salt, somewhere 
he lurks on the lonely mountains. And often when 
our lamps burn late, we fancy that we catch a waving 
of his tail and hear him padding across the night. 
But although we lash ourselves upon the chase and 
strain forward in the dark, the timid beast runs on 
swifter feet and scampers oif . 



On a Rainy Morning. 

AXORTHEASTER blew up last night and 
this morning we are lashed by wind and rain. 
]M foretold the change yesterday when 

we rode upon a 'bus top at nightfall. It was then 
pleasant enough and to my eye all was right aloft. 
I am not, however, weather-wise. I must feel the 
first patter of the storm before I hazard a judgment. 
To learn even the quarter of a breeze — unless there 
is a trail of smoke to guide me — I must hold up a wet 
finger. In my ignorance clouds sail across the heav- 
ens on a whim. Like white sheep they wander here 
and there for forage, and my suspicion of bad weather 
comes only when the tempest has wliipped them to a 
gallop. Even a band aroimd the moon — ^which I am 
told is priman^ instruction on the coming of a storm — 
stirs me chiefly by its deeper mystery, as if astrology-, 
come in from the distant stars, lifts here a warning 

finger. But ]M was brought up beside the sea, 

and she has a sailor's instinct for the weather. At the 
first preliminan^ shifting of the heavens, too slight 
for my coarser senses, she will tilt her nose and look 
around, then pronounce the coming of a storm. To 
her, therefore, I leave all questions of umbrellas and 
raincoats, and on her decision we go abroad. 

Last night when I awoke I knew that her prophecy 



CHIMNEY-POT PAPERS 



was right again, for the rain was blowing in my face 
and slashing on the upper window. The wind, too, 
was whistling along the roofs, with a try at chimney- 
pots and spouts. It was the wolf in the fairy story 
who said he'd huff and he'd puff, and he'd blow in 
the house where the little pig lived; yet tonight his 
humor was less savage. Down below I heard ash- 
cans toppling over all along the street and rolling to 
the gutters. It lacks a few nights of Hallowe'en, but 
doubtless the wind's calendar is awry and he is out 
already with his mischief. When a window rattles 
at this season, it is the tick-tack of his roguish finger. 
If a chimney is overthrown, it is his jest. Tomorrow 
we shall find a broken shutter as his rowdy celebration 
of the night. 

This morning is by general agreement a nasty day. 
I am not sure that I assent. If I were the old woman 
at the corner who sells newspapers from a stand, I 
would not like the weather, for the pent roof drops 
water on her stock. Scarcely is the peppermint safe 
beyond the splatter. Nor is it, I fancy, a profitable 
day for a street-organ man, who requires a sunny 
morning with open windows for a rush of business. 
Nor is there any good reason why a house-painter 
should be delighted with this blustering sky, unless 
he is an idle fellow who seeks an excuse to lie in bed. 
But except in sympathy, why is our elevator boy so 
fiercely disposed against the weather? His cage is 
snug as long as the skylight holds. And why should 



ON A RAINY MORNING 37 

the warm dry noses of the city, pressed against ten 
thousand windows up and down the streets, be flat 
and sour this morning with disapproval? 

It may savor of bravado to find pleasure in what 
is so commonly condemned. Here is a smart fellow, 
you may say, who sets up a paradox — a conceited 
braggart who professes a difference to mankind. Or 
worse, it may appear that I try my hand at writing 
in a "happy vein." God forbid that I should be such 
a villain! For I once knew a man who, by reading 
these happy books, fell into pessimism and a sharp 
decUne. He had wasted to a peevish shadow and had 
taken to his bed before his physician discovered the 
seat of his ansemia. It was only by cutting the evil 
dose, chapter by chapter, that he finally restored him 
to his friends. Yet neither supposition of my case 
is true. We who enjoy wet and windy days are of 
a considerable number, and if our voices are seldom 
heard in public dispute, it is because we are overcome 
by the growling majority. You may know us, how- 
ever, by our stout boots, the kind of battered hats we 
wear, and our disregard of puddles. To our eyes 
alone, the rain swirls along the pavements like the 
mad rush of sixteenth notes upon a music staff. And 
to our ears alone, the wind sings the rattling tune 
recorded. 

Certainly there is more comedy on the streets on 
a wet and windy day than there is under a fair sky. 
Thin folk hold on at corners. Fat folk waddle before 



38 CHIMNEY-POT PAPERS 

the wind, their racing elbows wing and wing. Hats 
are whisked off and sail down the gutters on excited 
purposes of their own. It was only this morning that 
I saw an aristocratic silk hat bobbing along the pave- 
ment in familiar company with a stranger bonnet — 
surely a misalliance, for the bonnet was a shabby one. 
But in the wind, despite the difference of social 
station, an instant affinity had been established and 
an elopement was under way. 

Persons with umbrellas clamp them down close 
upon their heads and proceed blindly like the larger 
and more reckless crabs that you see in aquariums. 
Nor can we know until now what spirit for adventure 
resides in an umbrella. Hitherto it has stood in a 
Chinese vase beneath the stairs and has seemed a list- 
less creature. But when a November wind is up it 
is a cousin of the balloon, with an equal zest to explore 
the wider precincts of the earth and to alight upon 
the moon. Only persons of heavier ballast — such as 
have been fed on sweets — plump pancake persons — 
can hold now an umbrella to the ground. A long 
stowage of muffins and sugar is the only anchor. 

At this moment beneath my window there is a dear 
little girl who brings home a package from the 
grocer's. She is tugged and blown by her umbrella, 
and at every puff of wind she goes up on tiptoe. If 
I were writing a fairy tale I would make her the 
Princess of my plot, and I would transport her 
underneath her umbrella in this whisking wind to her 



ON A RAINY MORNING 89 

far adventures, just as Davy sailed off to the land of 
Goblins inside his grandfather's clock. She would 
be carried over seas, until she could sniff the spice 
winds of the south. Then she would be set down in 
the orchard of the Golden Prince, who presently 
would spy her from his window — a mite of a pretty 
girl, all mussed and blown about. And then I would 
spin out the tale to its true and happy end, and they 
would live together ever after. How she labors at 
the turn, hugging her paper bag and holding her 
flying skirts against her knees! An umbrella, how- 
ever, usually turns inside out before it gets you off 
the pavement, and then it looks like a wrecked Zeppe- 
lin. You put it in the first ash-can, and walk off in 
an attempt not to be conspicuous. 

Although the man who pursues his hat is, in some 
sort, conscious that he plays a comic part, and al- 
though there is a pleasing relish on the curb at his 
discomfort, yet it must not be assumed that all the 
humor on the street rises from misadventure. Rather, 
it arises from a general acceptance of the day and a 
feeling of common partnership in the storm. The 
policeman in his rubber coat exchanges banter with 
a cab-driver. If there is a tangle in the traffic, it 
comes nearer to a jest than on a fairer day. A team- 
ster sitting dry inside his hood, whistles so cheerily 
that he can be heard at the farther sidewalk. Good- 
naturedly he sets his tune as a rival to the wind. 

It must be that only good-tempered persons are 



Jfi CHIMNEY-POT PAPERS 

abroad — those whose humor endures and likes the 
storm — and that when the swift dark clouds drove 
across the world, all sullen folk scurried for a roof. 
And is it not wise, now and then, that folk be thus 
parceled with their kind? Must we wait for Gabriel's 
Trimip for our division? I have been told — but the 
story seems incredible — that that seemingly cursed 
thing, the Customs' Wharf, was established not so 
much for our nation's profit as in acceptance of some 
such general theory — in a word, that all sour persons 
might be housed together for their employment and 
society be rid of them. It is by an extension of this 
obscure but beneficent division that only those of 
better nature go abroad on these blustering November 
days. 

There are many persons, of course, who like sum- 
mer rains and boast of their liking. This is nothing. 
One might as well boast of his appetite for toasted 
cheese. Does one pin himself with badges if he plies 
an enthusiastic spoon in an ice-cream dish? Or was 
the love of sack ever a virtue, and has Falstaff become 
a saint? If he now sing in the Upper Choir, the 
bench must sag. But persons of this turn of argu- 
ment make a point of their willingness to walk out 
in a June rain. They think it a merit to go tripping 
across the damp grass to inspect their gardens. 
Toasted cheese! Of course they like it. Who could 
help it? This is no proof of merit. Such folk, at 
best, are but sisters in the brotherhood. 



ON A RAINY MORNING U 

And yet a November rain is but an August rain 
that has grown a beard and taken on the stalwart 
manners of the world. And the November wind, 
which piped madrigals in June and lazy melodies all 
the smnmer, has done no more than learn brisker 
braver tunes to befit the coming winter. If the wind 
tugs at your coat-tails, it only seeks a companion for 
its games. It goes forth whistling for honest cele- 
bration, and who shall begrudge it here and there a 
chimney if it topple it in sport? 

Despite this, rainy weather has a bad name. So 
general is its evil reputation that from of old one of 
the lowest circles of Hell has been plagued with raw 
winds and covered thick with ooze — a testament to 
our northern March — and in this villains were set 
shivering to their chins. But the beginning of the 
distaste for rainy weather may be traced to Noah. 
Certain it is that toward the end of his cruise, when 
the passengers were already chafing with the ani- 
mals — the kangaroos, in particular, it is said, played 
leap-frog in the hold and disturbed the skipper's 
sleep — certain it is while the heavens were still over- 
cast that Noah each morning put his head anxiously 
up through the forward hatch for a change of sky. 
There was rejoicing from stem to stern — so runs the 
legend — ^when at last his old white beard, shifting 
from west to east, gave promise of a clearing wind. 
But from that day to this, as is natural, there has 
persisted a stout prejudice against wind and rain. 



42 CHIMNEY-POT PAPERS 

But this is not just. If a rainy day lacks sun- 
shine, it has vigor for a substitute. The wind whistles 
briskly among the chimney tops. There is so much 
life on wet and windy days. Yesterday Nature 
yawned, but today she is wide awake. Yesterday the 
earth seemed lolling idly in the heavens. It was a 
time of celestial vacation and all the suns and moons 
were vacant of their usual purpose. But today the 
earth whirls and spins through space. Her gray 
cloud cap is pulled down across her nose and she leans 
in her hurry against the storm. The heavens have 
piped the planets to their work. 

Yesterday the smoke of chimneys drifted up with 
tired content from lazy roofs, but today the smoke 
is stretched and torn like a triimiphant banner of the 
storm. 




( ( 



1917 



> ? 



I DREAMED last night a fearful dream and this 
morning even the familiar contact of the subway 
has been unable to shake it from me. 

I know of few things that are so momentarily- 
tragical as awakening from a frightful dream. Even 
if you know with returning consciousness that it was 
a dream, it seems as if a part of it must have a basis 
in fact. The death that was recorded — is it true or 
not? And in your mind you grope among the famil- 
iar landmarks of your recollection to discover where 
the true and the fictitious join. 

But this dream of last night was so vivid that this 
morning I cannot shake it from me. 

I dreamed — ridiculously enough — that the whole 
world was at war, and that big and little nations were 
fighting. 

In my dream the round earth hung before me 



Uh CHIMNEY-POT PAPERS 

against the background of the night, and red flames 
shot from every part. 

I heard cries of anguish — ^men blinded by gases 
and crazed by suffering. I saw women dressed in 
black — a long procession stretching hideously from 
mist to mist — ^walking with erect heads, dry-eyed, for 
grief had starved them of tears. I saw ships sinking 
and a thousand arms raised for a moment above the 
waves. I saw children lying dead among their toys. 

And I saw boys throw down their books and tools 
and go off with glad cries, and men I saw, grown 
gray with despair, staggering under heavy weights. 

There were millions of dead upon the earth that 
hung before me, and I smelled the battlefield. 

And I beheld one man — one hundred men — secure 
in an outlawed country — who looked from far win- 
dows — ^men bitter with disappointment — men who 
blasphemed of God, while their victims rotted in 
Flanders. 

And in my dream it seemed that I did not have a 
sword, but that I, too, looked upon the battle from 
a place where there were no flames. I ran little 
errands for the war. 

There is the familiar window — ^that dull outline 
across the room. Here is the accustomed door. The 
bed is set between. It was but a dream after all. And 
yet how it has shaken me ! 

Of course the dream was absurd. No man — ^no 



nation certainly — could be so mad. The whole whirl- 
ing earth could not burn with fire. Until the final 
trumpet, no such calamity is possible. Thank God, 
it was but a dream, and I can continue today my 
peaceful occupation. 

Calico, I'm told, is going up. I must protect our 
contracts. 



On Going Afoot, 



THERE is a tale that somewhere in the world 
there is a merry river that dances as often as 
it hears sweet music. The tale is not precise 
whether this river is neighbor to us or is a stream of 
the older world. "It dances at the noise of musick," 
so runs the legend, "for with musick it bubbles, dances 
and grows sandy." This tale may be the conceit of 
one of those older poets whose verses celebrafe the 
morning and the freshness of the earth — Thomas 
Heywood could have written it or even the least of 
those poets who sat their evenings at the Mermaid — 
or the tale may arise more remotely from an old wor- 
ship of the god Pan, who is said to have piped along 
the streams. I offer my credence to the earlier origin 
as the more pleasing. And therefore on a country 
walk I observe the streams if by chance any of them 
shall fit the tale. Not yet have I seen Pan puffing his 
cheeks with melody on a streamside bank — by ill luck 
I squint short-sightedly — but I often hear melodies 
of such woodsy composition that surely they must 
issue from his pipe. The stream leaps gaily across 
the shallows that glitter with sunlight, and I am 
tempted to the agreeable suspicion that I have hit 
upon the very stream of the legend and that the god 
Pan sits hard by in the thicket and beats his shagg}^ 



48 CHIMNEY-POT PAPERS 

hoof in rhythm. It is his song that the wind sings in 
the trees. If a bird sings in the meadow its tune is 
pitched to Pan's reedy obligato. 

Whether or not this is true, I confess to a love of 
a stream. This may be merely an anaemic love of 
beauty, such as is commonly bred in townsfolk on a 
holiday, or it may descend from braver ancestors who 
once were anglers and played truant with hook and 
line. You may recall that the milk-women of Kent 
told Piscator when he came at the end of his day's 
fishing to beg a cup of red cow's milk, that anglers 
were "honest, civil, quiet men." I have, also, a habit 
of contemplation, which I am told is proper to an 
angler. I can lean longer than most across the railing 
of a country bridge if the water runs noisily on the 
stones. If I chance to come off a dusty road — ^unless 
hunger stirs me to an inn — I can listen for an hour, 
for of all sounds it is the most musical. When earth 
and air and water play in concert, which are the 
master musicians this side of the moon, surely their 
harmony rises above the music of the stars. 

In a more familiar mood I throw stepping stones 
in the water to hear them splash, or I cram them in 
a dam to thwart the purpose of the stream, laying 
ever a higher stone when the water laps the top. I 
scoop out the sand and stones as if a mighty shipping 
begged for passage. Or I rest from this prodigious 
engineering upon my back and watch the white traffic 
of the clouds across the summer sky. The roots of 



ON GOING AFOOT 49 

an antique oak peep upon the flood as in the golden 
days of Arden. Apple blossoms fall upon the water 
like the snow of a more kindly winter. A gay leaf 
puts out upon the channel like a painted galleon for 
far adventure. A twig sails off freighted with my 
drowsy thoughts. A branch of a willow dips in the 
stream and writes an endless trail of words in the 
running water. In these evil days when the whole 
fair world is trenched and bruised with war, what 
wisdom does it send to the valleys where men reside — 
what love and peace and gentleness — ^what promise 
of better days to come — ^that it makes this eternal 
stream its messenger! 

And yet a stream is best if it is but an incident in 
travel — if it break the dusty afternoon and send one 
off refreshed. Rather than a place for fishing it 
invites one to bathe his feet. There are, indeed, 
persons so careful of their health as to assert that cold 
water endangers blisters. Theirs is a prudence to be 
neglected. Such persons had better leave their feet 
at home safely slippered on the fender. If one's feet 
go upon a holiday, is it fair that for fear of conse- 
quence they be kept housed in their shoes ? Shall the 
toes sit inside their battered caravans while the legs 
and arms frisk outside? Is there such torture in a 
blister — even if the prevention be sure — to outweigh 
the pleasure of cold water running across the ankles ? 

It was but lately that I followed a road that lay off 
the general travel through a pleasant country of hills 



50 CHIMNEY-POT PAPERS 

and streams. As the road was not a thoroughfare 
and journeyed no farther than the near-by town 
where I was to get my supper, it went at a lazy wind- 
ing pace. If a dog barked it was in sleepy fashion. 
He yelped merely to check his loneliness. There 
could be no venom on his drowsy tooth. The very 
cows that fed along its fences were of a slower breed 
and more contemplative whisk of tail than are found 
upon the thoroughfares. Sheep patched the fields 
with gray and followed their sleepy banquet across 
the hills. 

The country was laid out with farms — orchards 
and soft fields of grain that waved like a golden 
lake — ^but there were few farmhouses. In all the 
afternoon I passed but one person, a deaf man who 
asked for direction. When I cried out that I was a 
stranger, he held his hand to his ear, but his mouth 
fell open as if my words, denied by deafness from a 
proper portal, were offered here a service entrance. 
I spread my map before him and he put an ample 
thumb upon it. Then inquiring whether I had 
crossed a road with a red house upon it where his 
friend resided, he thanked me and walked off with 
such speed as his years had left him. Birds sang 
delightfully on the fences and in the field, yet I knew 
not their names. Shall one not enjoy a symphony 
without precise knowledge of the instrument that 
gives the tune ? If an oboe sound a melody, must one 
bestow a special praise, with a knowledge of its func- 



ON GOING AFOOT 51 

tion in the concert? Or if a trombone please, must 
one know the brassy creature by its name? Rather, 
whether I listen to horns or birds, in my ignorance I 
bestow loosely a general approbation; yet is the song 
sweet. 

All afternoon I walked with the sound of wind and 
water in my ears, and at night, when I had gained my 
journey's end and lay in bed, I heard beneath my 
window in the garden the music of a little runnel that 
was like a faint and pleasant echo of my hillside walk. 
I fell asleep to its soothing sound and its trickle made 
a pattern across my dreams. 

But perhaps you yourself, my dear sir, are addicted 
to these country walks, either for an afternoon or for 
a week's duration with a rucksack strapped across 
your back. If denied the longer outing, I hope that 
at least it is your custom to go forth upon a holiday 
to look upon the larger earth. Where the road most 
winds and dips and the distance is of the finer purple, 
let that direction be your choice! Seek out the region 
of the hills! Outposts and valleys here, with smoke 
of suppers rising. Trains are so small that a child 
might draw them with a string. Far-off hills are 
tumbled and in confusion, as if a giant were roused 
and had flung his rumpled cloak upon the plain. 

Or if a road and a stream seem close companions, 
tag along with them! Like three cronies you may 
work the countryside together! There are old mills 



52 CHIMNEY-POT PAPERS 

with dams and mossy water wheels, and rumbhng 
covered bridges. 

But chiefly I beg that you wander out at random 
without too precise knowledge of where you go or 
where you shall get your supper. If you are of a 
cautious nature, as springs from a delicate stomach 
or too sheltered life, you may stuff a bar of chocolate 
in your pocket. Or an apple — if you shift your other 
ballast — ^will not sag you beyond locomotion. I have 
known persons who prize a tomato as oflFering both 
food and drink, yet it is too likely to be damaged and 
squirt inside the pocket if you rub against a tree. 
Instead, the cucumber is to be commended for its 
coolness, and a pickle is a sour refreshment that 
should be nibbled in turn against the chocolate. 

Food oftentimes is to be got upon the way. There 
is a kind of cocoanut bar, flat and corrugated, that 
may be had at most crossroads. I no longer consider 
these a delicacy, but in my memory I see a boy bar- 
gaining for them at the counter. They are counted 
into his dirty palm. He stuffs a whole one in his 
mouth, from ear to ear. His bicycle leans against the 
trough outside. He mounts, wabbling from side to 
side to reach the pedals. Before him lie the moun- 
tains of the world. 

Nor shall I complain if you hold roughly in your 
mind, subject to a whim's reversal, an evening desti- 
nation to check your hunger. But do not bend your 
circuit back to the noisy city! Let your march end 



ON GOING AFOOT 53 

at the inn of a country town ! If it is but a station on 
your journey and you continue on the morrow, let 
there be an ample porch and a rail to rest your feet! 
Here you may sit in the comfortable twilight when 
crammed with food and observe the town's small 
traiRc. Country folk come about, if you are of easy 
address, and engage you on their crops. The village 
prophet strokes his wise beard at your request and, 
squinting at the sky, foretells a storm. Or if the 
night is cold, a fire is laid inside and a wrinkled board 
for the conduct of the war debates upon the hearth. 
But so far as your infirmity permits, go forth at 
random with a spirit for adventure ! If the prospect 
pleases you as the train slows down for the platform, 
cast a penny on your knee and abide its fall! 

Or if on principle you abhor a choice that is made 
wickedly on the falling of a coin, let an irrelevant 
circumstance direct your destination! I once walked 
outside of London, making my start at Dorking for 
no other reason except that Sam Weller's mother-in- 
law had once lived there. You will recall how the 
elder Mr. Weller in the hour of his affliction dis- 
coursed on widows in the taproom of the Marquis 
of Granby when the funeral was done, and how later, 
being pestered with the Reverend Mr. Stiggins, he 
immersed him in the horse-trough to ease his grief. 
All through the town I looked for red-nosed men who 
might be descended from the reverend shepherd, 
and once when I passed a horse-trough of uncommon 



54, CHIMNEY-POT PAPERS 

size I asked the merchant at the corner if it might 
not be the very place. I was met, however, by such 
a vacant stare — for the fellow was unlettered — that 
to rouse him I bought a cucumber from an open crate 
against the time of lunch, and I followed my pursuit 
further in the town. The cucumber was of monstrous 
length and thin. All about the town its end stuck out 
of my pocket inquisitively, as though it were a fellow 
traveler down from London to see the sights. But 
although I inquired for the Weller family, it seems 
that they were dead and gone. Even the Marquis of 
Granby had disappeared, with its room behind the 
bar where Mr. Stiggins drank pineapple rum with 
water, luke, from the kettle on the hob. 

We left Dorking and walked all afternoon through 
a pleasant sunny country, up hill and down, to the 
town of Guildford. At four o'clock, to break the 
journey, we laid out our lunch of bread and cheese 
and cucumber, and rested for an hour. The place 
was a grassy bank along a road above a fertile valley 
where men were pitching hay. Their shouts were 
carried across the fields with an agreeable softness. 
Today, doubtless, women work in those fields. 

On another occasion we walked from Maidstone to 
Rochester on pilgrimage to the inn where Alfred 
Jingle borrowed Mr. Winkle's coat to attend the 
Assembly, when he made love to the buxom widow. 
War had just been declared between Britain and 
Germany, and soldiers guarded the roads above the 



ON GOING AFOOT 55 

town. At a tea-room in the outskirts army officers 
ate at a neighboring table. Later, it is Hkely, they 
were in the retreat from Mons : for the expeditionary 
force crossed the channel within a week. Yet so does 
farce march along with tragedy that our chief con- 
qern in Rochester was the old inn where the ball was 
held. 

A surly woman who sat behind the cashier's wicket 
fixed me with her eye. "Might we visit the ball- 
room?" I inquired. Evidently not, unless we were 
stopping at the house. "Madame," I said, "perhaps 
you are unaware that the immortal Mr. Pickwick 
once sojourned beneath your roof." There was no 
response. "The celebrated Mr. Pickwick, G. C. M. 
P. C," I continued, "who was the discoverer of the 
sources of the Hampstead Ponds." At this — for my 
manner was impressive — she fumbled through the last 
few pages of her register and admitted that he might 
have been once a patron of the house, but that he had 
now paid his bill and gone. 

I was about to question her about the poet Augus- 
tus Snodgrass, who had been with Mr. Pickwick on 
his travels, when a waiter, a humorous fellow with a 
vision of a sixpence, offered to be our guide. We 
climbed the stairs and came upon the ballroom. It 
was a small room. Three quadrilles must have 
stuffed it to the edge — a dingy place with bare win- 
dows on a deserted innyard. At one end was a 
balcony that would hold not more than three musi- 



56 CHIMNEY-POT PAPERS 

cians. The candles of its former brightness have 
long since burned to socket. Vanished are "Sir 
Thomas Clubber, Lady Clubber and the Miss 
Clubbers!" Gone is the Honorable Wilmot Snipe 
and all the notables that once crowded it! Vanished 
is the punchbowl where the amorous Tracy Tupman 
drank too many cups of negus on that memorable 
night. I gave the dirty waiter a sixpence and came 
away. 

I discourage the usual literary pilgrimage. In- 
deed, if there is a rumor that Milton died in a neigh- 
boring town, or a treaty of consequence was signed 
close by, choose another path! Let neither Oliver 
Cromwell nor the Magna Carta deflect your course! 
One of my finest walks was on no better advice than 
the avoidance of a celebrated shrine. I was led along 
the swift waters of a river, through several pretty 
towns, and witnessed the building of a lofty bridge. 
For lunch I had some memorable griddlecakes. 
Finally I rode on top of a rattling stage with a gossip 
for a driver, whose long finger pointed out the sights 
upon the road. 

But for the liveliest truancy, keep an eye out for 
red-haired and freckled lads, and make them your 
counselors! Lads so spotted and colored, I have 
found, are of unusual enterprise in knowing the best 
woodland paths and the loftiest views. A yellow- 
haired boy, being of paler wit, will suck his thumb 
upon a question. A touzled black exhibits a sulky 



ON GOING AFOOT 57 

absorption in his work. An indifferent brown, at 
best, runs for an answer to the kitchen. But red- 
haired and freckled lads are alive at once. Whether 
or not their roving spirit, which is the basis of their 
deeper and quicker knowledge, proceeds from the 
magic of the pigment, the fact yet remains that such 
boys are surer than a signpost to direct one to ad- 
venture. This truth is so general that I have read 
the lives of the voyagers — Robinson Crusoe, Captain 
Kidd and the worthies out of Hakluyt — ^if perhaps 
a hint might drop that they too in their younger days 
were freckled and red-haired. Sir Walter Raleigh — 
I choose at random — ^was doubtless called "Carrots" 
by his playmates. But on making inquiry of a red- 
haired lad, one must have a clear head in the tumult 
of his direction. I was once lost for several hours on 
the side of Anthony's Nose above the Hudson be- 
cause I jumbled such advice. And although I made 
the acquaintance of a hermit who dwelt on the moun- 
tain with a dog and a scarecrow for his garden — a 
fellow so like him in garment and in feature that he 
seemed his younger and cleaner brother — still I did 
not find the top or see the clear sweep of the Hudson 
as was promised. 

If it is your habit to inquire of distance upon the 
road, do not quarrel with conflicting opinion! Judge 
the answer by the source! Persons of stalwart limb 
commonly underestimate a distance, whereas those 
of broken wind and stride stretch it greater than it 



58 CHIMNEY-POT PAPERS 

is. But it is best to take all answers lightly. I have 
heard of a man who spent his rainy evenings on a 
walking trip in going among the soda clerks and 
small merchants of the village, not for information, 
but to contrast their ignorance. Aladdin's wicked 
uncle, when he inquired direction to the mountain of 
the genii's cave, could not have been so misdirected. 
Shoemakers, candy-men and peddlers of tinware — if 
such modest merchants existed also on the curb in 
those magic days — ^must have been of nicer knowl- 
edge or old Kazrac would never have found the lamp. 
In my friend's case, on inquiry, a certain hotel at 
which we aimed was both good and bad, open and 
shut, burned and unburned. 

There is a legend of the Catholic Church about a 
certain holy chapel that once leaped across the Alps. 
It seems gross superstition, yet although I belong 
to a protesting church, I assert its likelihood. For 
I solemnly affirm that on a hot afternoon I chased 
a whole village that skipped quite as miraculously 
before me across the country. It was a village of 
stout leg and wind and, as often as I inquired, it still 
kept seven miles ahead. Once only I gained, by 
trotting on a descent. Not until night when the vil- 
lage lay down to rest beside a quiet river did I finally 
overtake it. And the next morning I arose early in 
order to be off first upon my travels, and so keep the 
lively rascal in the rear. 

In my country walks I usually carry a book in the 



ON GOING AFOOT 59 

pocket opposite to my lunch. I seldom read it, but 
it is a comfort to have it handy. I am told that at 
one of the colleges, students of smaller application, 
in order that they may truthfully answer as to the 
length of time they have spent upon their books, do 
therefore literally sit upon a pile of them, as on a 
stool, while they engage in pleasanter and more 
secular reading. I do not examine this story closely, 
which rises, doubtless, from the jealousy of a rival 
college. Rather, I think that these students perch 
upon the books which presently they must read, on 
a wise instinct that this preliminary contact starts 
their knowledge. And therefore a favorite volume, 
even if unopened in the pocket, does nevertheless by 
its proximity color and enhance the enjoyment of 
the day. I have carried Howell, who wrote the 
"Familiar Letters," unread along the countryside. A 
small volume of Bos well has grown dingy in my 
pocket. I have gone about with a copy of Addison 
with long S's, but I read it chiefly at home when my 
feet are on the fender. 

I had by me once as I crossed the Devon moors a 
volume of "Richard Feverel." For fifteen miles I 
had struck across the upland where there is scarcely a 
house in sight — nothing but grazing sheep and wild 
ponies that ran at my approach. Sometimes a marshy 
stream flowed down a shallow valley, with a curl of 
smoke from a house that stood in the hollow. At the 
edge of this moorland, I came into a shady valley 



60 CHIMNEY-POT PAPERS 

that proceeded to the ocean. My feet were pinched 
and tired when I heard the sound of water below the 
road. I pushed aside the bushes and saw a stream 
trickling on the rocks. I thrust my head into a pool 
until the water ran into my ears, and then sat with 
my bare feet upon the cool stones where the runnel 
lapped them, and read "Richard Feverel." To this 
day, at the mention of the title, I can hear the pleas- 
ant brawl of water and the stirring of the branches 
in the wind that wandered down the valley. 

Hazlitt tells us in a famous passage with what 
relish he once read "The New Eloise" on a walking 
trip. "It was on the 10th of April, 1798," he writes, 
"that I sat down to a volume of the New Eloise, at 
the inn at Llangollen, over a bottle of sherry and a 
cold chicken." I am quite unfamiliar with the book, 
yet as often as I read the essay — ^which is the best 
of Hazlitt — I have been teased to buy it. Perhaps 
this springs in part from my own recollection of 
Llangollen, where I once stopped on a walking trip 
through Wales. The town lies on the river Dee at 
the foot of fertile hills patched with fences, on whose 
top there stand the ruins of Dinas Bran, a fortress 
of forgotten history, although it looks grimly towards 
the English marches as if its enemies came thence. 
Thrown across the river there is a peaked bridge of 
gray stone, many centuries old, on which the village 
folk gather at the end of day. I dined on ale and 
mutton of such excellence that, for myself, a cold 



ON GOING AFOOT 61 

volume of the census — if I had fallen so low — ^must 
have remained agreeably in memory. I recall that 
a street-organ stopped beneath the window and 
played a merry tune — or perhaps the wicked ale was 
mounting — and I paused in my onslaught against 
the mutton to toss the musician a coin. 

I applaud those who, on a walking trip, arise and 
begin their journey in the dawn, but although I am 
eager at night to make an early start, yet I blink and 
growl when the morning comes. I marvel at the poet 
who was abroad so early that he was able to write of 
the fresh twihght on the world — "Where the san- 
dalled Dawn like a Greek god takes the hurdles of 
the hills" — but for my own part I would have slept 
and missed the sight. But an early hour is best, de- 
spite us lazybones, and to be on the road before the 
dew is gone and while yet a mist arises from the 
hollows is to know the journey's finest pleasure. 

Persons of early hours assert that they feel a fine 
exaltation. I am myself inclined to think, however, 
that this is not so much an exaltation that arises from 
the beauty of the hour, as from a feeling of superior- 
ity over their sleeping and inferior comrades. It is 
akin to the displeasing vanity of those persons who 
walk upon a boat with easy stomach while their com- 
panions lie below. I would discourage, therefore, 
persons that lean toward conceit from putting a foot 
out of bed until the second call. On the other hand, 
those who are of a self-depreciative nature should get 



CHIMNEY-POT PAPERS 



up with the worm and bird. A man of my own 
acquaintance who was sunk in self-abasement for 
many years, was roused to a salutary conceit by no 
other tonic. 

And it is certain that to be off upon a journey with 
a rucksack strapped upon you at an hour when the 
butcher boy takes down his shutters is a high pleasure. 
Off you go through the village with swinging arms. 
Off you go across the country. A farmer is up before 
you and you hear his reaper across the field, and the 
neighing of his horses at the turn. Where the hill 
falls sharp against the sky, there he stands outlined, 
to wipe the sweat. And as your nature is, swift or 
sluggish thoughts go through your brain — plots and 
vagrant fancies, which later your pencil will not 
catch. It is in these earliest hours while the dew still 
glistens that little lyric sentences leap into your mind. 
Then, if at all, are windmills giants. 

There are cool retreats where you may rest at 
noon, but Stevenson has written of these. "You 
come," he writes, "to a milestone on a hill, or some 
place where deep ways meet under trees ; and off goes 
the knapsack, and down you sit to smoke a pipe in 
the shade. You sink into yourself, and the birds 
come round and look at you; and your smoke dis- 
sipates upon the afternoon under the blue dome of 
heaven; and the sun lies warm upon your feet, and 
the cool air visits your neck and turns aside your open 



ON GOING AFOOT 63 

shirt. If you are not happy, you must have an evil 
conscience." 

And yet a good inn at night holds even a more 

tranquil joy. M and I, who frequently walk 

upon a holiday, traversed recently a mountain road 
to the north of West Point. During the afternoon 
we had scrambled up Storm King to a bare rock 
above the Hudson. It was just such an outlook as 
Rip found before he met the outlandish Dutchmen 
with their ninepins and flagon. We lay here above 
a green world that was rimmed with mountains, and 
watched the lagging sails and puffs of smoke upon 
the river. It was late afternoon when we descended 
to the mountain road that runs to West Point. 
During all the day there had been distant rumbling 
of thunder, as though a storm mustered in a far-off 
valley, — or perhaps the Dutchmen of the legend still 
lingered at their game, — but now as the twijight fell 
the storm came near. It was six o'clock when a sign- 
board informed us that we had seven miles to go, and 
already the thunder sounded with earnest purpose. 
Far below in the dusk we saw the lights of West 
Point. On a sudden, while I was still fumbling for 
my poncho which was rolled inside my rucksack, the 
storm burst upon us. We put up the umbrella and 
held the poncho against the wind and driving rain. 
But the wind so whisked it about and the rain was so 
eager to find the openings that presently we were 
drenched. In an hour we came to West Point. 



6i CHIMNEY-POT PAPERS 

Luckily the cook was up, and she served us a hot 
dinner in our rooms with the washstand for a table. 
When we started there was a piece of soap in the 
dish, but I think we ate it in our hunger. I recall 
that there was one course that foamed up like custard 
and was not upon the bill. It was a plain room with 
meager furniture, yet we fell asleep with a satisfac- 
tion beyond the Cecils in their lordly beds. I stirred 
once when there was a clamor in the hall of guests 
returning from a hop at the Academy — a prattle of 
girls' voices — ^then slept until the sun was up. 

But my preference in lodgings is the low sagging 
half-timbered building that one finds in the country 
towns of England. It has leaned against the street 
and dispensed hospitality for three hundred years. 
It is as old a citizen as the castle on the hill. It is an 
inn where Tom Jones might have spent the night, or 
any of the rascals out of Smollett. Behind the wicket 
there sits a shrewish female with a cold eye towards 
your defects, and behind her there is a row of bells 
which jangle when water is wanted in the rooms. 
Having been assigned a room and asked the hour of 
dinner, you mount a staircase that rises with a 
squeak. There is a mustiness about the place, which 
although it is unpleasant in itself, is yet agreeable 
in its circumstance. A long hall runs off to the back 
of the house, with odd steps here and there to throw 
you. Your room looks out upon a coach-yard, and 
as you wash you overhear a love-passage down below. 



ON GOING AFOOT 65 

In the evening you go forth to see the town. If it 
lies on the ocean, you walk upon the mole and watch 
the fisher folk winding up their nets, or sitting with 
tranquil pipes before their doors. Maybe a booth has 
been set up on the parade that runs along the ocean, 
and a husky fellow bids you lay out a sixpence for 
the show, which is the very same, he bawls, as was 
played before the King and the Royal Family. This 
speech is followed by a fellow with a trombone, who 
blows himself very red in the face. 

But rather I choose to fancy that it is an inland 
town, and that there is a quieter traffic on the streets. 
Here for an hour after dinner, while darkness settles, 
you wander from shop to shop and put your nose 
upon the glass, or you engage the lamplighter as he 
goes his rounds, for any bit of news. 

Once in such a town when the night brought rain, 
for want of other employment, I debated divinity 
with a rigid parson, and until a late hour sat in the 
thick curtain of his attack. It was at an inn of one 
of the midland counties of England, a fine old 
weathered building, called "The King's Arms." In 
the tap — for I thrust my thirsty head inside — was an 
array of old pewter upon the walls, and two or three 
prints of prize fighters of former days. But it was 
in the parlor the parson engaged me. In the corner 
of the room there was a timid fire — of the kind usually 
met in English inns — imprisoned behind a grill that 
had been set up stoutly to confine a larger and 



CHIMNEY-POT PAPERS 



rowdier fire. My antagonist was a tall lank man of 
pinched ascetic face and dark complexion, with 
clothes brushed to shininess, and he belonged to a 
brotherhood that lived in one of the poorer parts of 
London along the wharves. His sojourn at the inn 
was forced. For two weeks in the year, he explained, 
each member was cast out of the conventual buildings 
upon the world. This was done in penance, as the 
members of more rigid orders in the past were 
flagellants for a season. So here for a whole week 
had he been sitting, for the most part in rainy 
weather, busied with the books that the inn afforded — 
advertising booklets of the beauties of the Alps — 
diagrams of steamships — and peeking out of doors 
for a change of sky. 

It was a matter of course that he should engage 
me in conversation. He was as lonesome for a chance 
to bark as a country dog. Presently when I dis- 
sented from some point in his creed, he called me a 
heretic, and I with gentlest satire asked him if the 
word yet lived. But he was not angry, and he told 
me of his brotherhood. It had a branch in America, 
and he bade me, if ever I met any of its priests, to 
convey to them his warm regards. As for America, 
it was, he said, too coldly ethical, and needed most a 
spiritual understanding; to which judgment I as- 
sented. I wonder now whether the war will bring 
that understanding. Maybe, unless blind hatred 
smothers it. 



ON GOING AFOOT 67 

This priest was a mixture of stern and gentle 
qualities, and seemed to be descended from those 
earlier friars that came to England in cord and gown, 
and went barefoot through the cities to minister 
comfort and salvation to the poor and wretched. 
When the evening was at last spent, by conmion 
consent we took our candles on the landing, where, 
after he inculcated a final doctrine of his church with 
waving finger, he bade me good night, with a wish of 
luck for my journey on the morrow, and sought his 
room. 

My own room lay down a creaking hallway. When 
undressed, I opened my window and looked upon the 
street. All lights were out. At last the rain had 
ceased, and now above the housetops across the way, 
through a broken patch of cloud, a star appeared 
with a promise of a fair tomorrow. 



On Livelihoods. 

SOMEWHERE in his letters, I think, Steven- 
son pronounces street paving to be his favorite 
occupation. I fancy, indeed, — and I have ra'n- 
sacked his life, — that he never applied himself to its 
practice for an actual livelihood. That was not 
necessary. Rather, he looked on at the curb in a 
careless whistling mood, hands deep in the pockets 
of his breeks, in a lazy interval between plot and 
essay. The sunny morning had dropped its golden 
invitation through his study windows, and he has 
wandered forth to see the world. Let my heroes — for 
thus I interpret him at his desk as the sunlight beck- 
oned—let my heroes kick their heels in patience! 
Let villains fret inside the inkpot ! Down, sirs, down, 
into the glossy magic pool, until I dip you up! 
Pirates — for surely such miscreants lurked among 
his papers — let pirates, he cries, save their red oaths 
until tomorrow! My hat! My stick! 

It was thus, then, as an amateur that Stevenson 
looked on street paving — the even rows of cobbles, 
the nice tapping to fit the stones against the curb, 
the neat joint around the drain. And yet, unpardon- 
ably, he neglects the tarpot; and this seems the very 
soul of the business, the finishing touch — almost 
culinary, as when a cook pours on a chocolate sauce. 



ON LIVELIHOODS 69 

I remember pleasantly when our own street was 
paved. There had been laid a waterpipe, deep down 
where the earth was yellow — surely gold was near — 
and several of us young rascals climbed in and out 
in the twilight when work was stopped. By fits we 
were both mountaineers and miners. There was an 
agreeable gassy smell as if we neared the lower 
regions. Here was a playground better than the 
building of a barn, even with its dizzy ladders and the 
scaffolding around the chimney. Or we hid in the 
great iron pipes that lay along the gutters, and fol- 
lowed our leader through them home from school. 
But when the pipes were lowered into place and the 
surface was cobbled but not yet sanded, then the 
tarpot yielded gum for chewing. At any time after 
supper a half dozen of us — blacker daubs against the 
darkness — ^might have been seen squatting on the 
stones, scratching at the tar. Blackjack, bought at 
the corner, had not so full a flavor. But one had to 
chew forward in the mouth — lightly, lest the tar 
adhere forever to the teeth. 

And yet I am not entirely in accord with Steven- 
son in his preference. 

And how is it, really, that people fall into their 
livelihoods? What circumstance or necessity drives 
them? Does choice, after all, always yield to a con- 
trary wind and run for any port? Is hunger always 
the helmsman? How many of us, after due appraisal 
of ourselves, really choose our own parts in the 



no CHIMNEY-POT PAPERS 

mighty drama? — first citizen or second, with our 
shrill voices for a moment above the crowd — first 
citizen or second — brief choristers, except for vanity, 
against a painted scene. How runs the rhyme? — 
rich man, poor man, beggar man, thief; doctor, 
lawyer, merchant, chief! And a robustious fellow 
with great voice, and lace and sword, strutting for- 
ward near the lights. 

Meditating thus, I frequently poke about the city 
in the end of afternoon "when the mind of your man 
of letters requires some relaxation." I peer into shop 
windows, not so much for the wares displayed as for 
glimpses of the men and women engaged in their 
disposal. I watch laborers trudging home with the 
tired clink of their implements and pails. I gaze 
into cellarways where tailor and cobbler sit bent 
upon their work — needle and peg, their world — and 
through fouled windows into workrooms, to learn 
which livelihoods yield the truest happiness. For it 
is, on the whole, a whistling rather than a grieving 
world, and like little shouts among the hills is laughter 
echoed in the heart. 

I can well understand how one can become a baker 
or even a small grocer with a pencil behind his ear. 
I could myself honestly recommend an apple — an 
astrachan for sauces — or, in the season, offer aspar- 
agus with something akin to enthusiasm. Cran- 
berries, too, must be an agreeable consort of the 
autumn months when the air turns frosty. I would 



ON LIVELIHOODS 71 

own a cat with a dusty nose to rub along the barrels 
and sleep beneath the stove. I would carry dried 
meats in stock were it only for the electric slicing 
machine. And whole cheeses! Or to a man of 
romantic mind an old brass shop may have its lure. 
To one of musty turn, who would sit apart, there is 
something to be said for the repair of violins and 
'cellos. At the least he sweetens discord into melody. 
But I would not willingly keep a second-hand 
bookshop. It is too cluttered a business. There is 
too free a democracy between good and bad. It was 
Dean Swift who declared that collections of books 
made him melancholy, "where the best author is as 
much squeezed and as obscure as a porter at a coro- 
nation." Nor is it altogether reassuring for one who 
is himself by way of being an author to view the 
certain neglect that awaits him when attics are 
cleared at last. There is too leathery a smell upon 
the premises, a thick deposit of mortality. I draw 
a deep breath when I issue on the street, grateful for 
the sunlight and the wind. However, I frequently 
put my head in at Pratt's around the corner, some- 
times by chance when the family are assembled for 
their supper in one of the book alcoves. They have 
swept back a litter of historians to make room for 
the tray of dishes. To cut them from the shop they 
have drawn a curtain in front of their nook, but I can 
hear the teapot bubbling on the counter. There is, 
also, a not unsavory smell which, if my old nose 



CHIMNEY-POT PAPERS 



retains its cunning, is potato stew, fetched up from 
the kitchen. If you seek Gibbon now, Pratt's face 
will show like a withered moon between the curtains 
and will request you to call later when the dishes have 
been cleared. 

No one works in cleaner produce than carpenters. 
They are for the most part a fatherly whiskered 
tribe and they eat their lunches neatly from a pail, 
their backs against the wall, their broad toes up- 
turned. I look suspiciously on painters, however, 
who present themselves for work like slopped and 
shoddy harlequins, and although I have myself passed 
a delightful afternoon painting a wooden fence at the 
foot of the garden — and been scraped afterwards — I 
would not wish to be of their craft. 

But perhaps one is of restless habit and a peri- 
patetic occupation may be reconmiended. For a 
bachelor of small expense, at a hazard, a wandering 
fruit and candy cart offers the venture and chance 
of unfamiliar journeys. There is a breed of loUypop 
on a stick that shows a handsome profit when the 
children come from school. Also, at this minute, I 
hear below me on the street the flat bell of the scissors- 
grinder. I know not what skill is required, yet it 
needs a pretty eye and even foot. The ragman takes 
to an ancestral business and chants the ancient song 
of his fathers. When distance has somewhat muffled 
its nearer sharpness, the song bears a melody un- 
paralleled among tradesmen's cries. Window glass, 



ON LIVELIHOODS 73 

too, is hawked pleasantly from house to house and 
requires but a knife and putty. In the spring the 
vegetable vender, standing in his wagon, utters 
melodious sounds that bring the housewives to their 
windows. Once, also, by good luck, I fell into 
acquaintance with a fellow who peddled brooms and 
dustpans along the countryside. He was hung both 
front and back with cheap commodities — a necklace 
of scrubbing brushes — ^tins jangling against his 
knees. A very kitchen had become biped. A pantry 
had gone on pilgrimage. Except for dogs, which 
seemed maddened by his strange appearance, it was, 
he informed me, an engaging livelihood for a man 
who chafed indoors. Or for one of dreamy disposi- 
tion the employment of a sandwich man, with bill- 
boards fore and aft, offers a profitable repose. Some- 
times several of these philosophers journey together 
up the street in a crowded hour, one behind another 
with slow introspective step, as befits their high 
preoccupation. 

Or one has an ear, and the street-organ commends 
itself. Observe the musician at the corner, hat in 
hand and smiling! Let but a curtain stir and his eye 
will catch it. He hears a falling penny as 'twere any 
nightingale. His tunes are the herald of the gaudy 
spring. His are the dancing measures of the sun- 
light. And is anyone a surer judge of human nature? 
He allows dyspeptics to slink along the fence. Those 
of bilious aspect may go their ways unchallenged. 



7^ CHIMNEY-POT PAPERS 

Spare me those, he says, who have not music in their 
souls : they are fit for treasons, stratagems, and spoils. 
It was with a flute that the poet Goldsmith starved 
his way through France. Yet the flute is a cold un- 
stirring instrument. He would have dined the oftener 
had he pitched upon a street-organ. 

But in this Christmas season there is a man goes 
up and down among the shoppers blowing shrill 
tunes upon a pipe. A card upon his hat announces 
that it is music makes the home and that one of his 
marvelous implements may be bought for the trifling 
and altogether insignificant sum of ten cents. A 
reticule across his stomach bulges with his pipes. He 
seems to manipulate the stops with his fingers, but 
I fancy that he does no more than sing into the larger 
opening. Yet his gay tune sounds above the traffic. 

I have wondered where such seasonal professions 
recruit themselves. The eyeglass man still stands at 
his corner with his tray. He is, moreover, too sodden 
a creature to play upon a pipe. Nor is there any 
dwindling of shoe-lace peddlers. The merchants of 
popcorn have not fallen off in number, and peanuts 
hold up strong. Rather, these Christmas musicians 
are of the tribe which at other festivals sell us little 
flags and bid us show our colors. They come from 
country fairs and circuses. All summer long they 
bid us gather for the fat man, or they cry up the 
beauties of a Turkish harem. If some valiant fellow 
in a painted tent is about to swallow glass, they are 



ON LIVELIHOODS 75 

his horn and drum to draw the crowd. I once knew 
a side-show man who bent iron bars between his teeth 
and who smnmoned stout men from his audience to 
swing upon the bar, but I cannot believe that he has 
discharged the bawHng rascal at his door. I rather 
choose to think that the piper was one of those self- 
same artists who, on lesser days, squeeze comic rubber 
faces in their fingers, or make the monkey climb its 
predestined stick. 

Be this as it may, presently the piper hit on a per- 
suasive tune and I abandoned all thought of the 
Noah's ark — my errand of the morning for my 
nephew — and joined the crowd that followed him. 
Hamelin Town was come again. But street violins 
I avoid. They suggest mortgages and unpaid rent. 

But with the world before him why should a man 
turn dentist ? He must have been a cruel fellow from 
his rattle. When did his malicious ambition first 
sprout up towards molars and bicuspids? Or who 
would scheme to be a plumber? He is a cellarer — 
alas, how shrunk from former days ! Or consider the 
tailor! Perhaps you recall Elia's estimate. "Do you 
ever see him," he asks, "go whistling along the foot- 
path like a carman, or brush through a crowd like a 
baker, or go smiling to himself like a lover?" 

Certainly I would not wish to be a bookkeeper and 
sit bent all day over another's wealth. I would not 
want to bring in on lifted fingers the meats which 
another eats. Xor would I choose to be a locksmith. 



76 CHIMNEY-POT PAPERS 

which is a kind of squint-eyed business, up two dismal 
stairs and at the rear. A gas lamp flares at the turn. 
A dingy staircase mounts into a thicker gloom. The 
locksmith consorts with pawnbrokers, with cheap 
sign-makers and with disreputable doctors; yet he is 
not of them. For there adheres to him a sort of 
romance. He is a creature of another time, set in 
our midst by the merest chance. The domestic cat, 
descended from the jungle, is not more shrunk. Keys 
have fallen on evil days. Observe the mighty row of 
them hung discarded along his boxes! Each one is fit 
to unlock a castle. Warwick itself might yield to 
such a weight of metal — rusty now, disused, quite out 
of fashion, displaced by a race of dwarfs. In the old 
prints, see how the London 'prentice runs with his 
great key in the dawn to take down his master's shut- 
ter! In a musty play, observe the jailor at the dun- 
geon door! Without massive keys jingling at the 
belt the older drama must have been a weakling. 
Only lovers, then, dared to laugh at locksmiths. But 
now locksmiths sit brooding on the past, shriveled to 
mean uses, ready for paltry kitchen jobs. 

And the undertaker, what shall we say of him? 
That black coat with the flower! That mournful 
smile! That perfect grief! And yet, I am told, 
undertakers, after hours, go singing home to supper, 
and spend their evenings at the movies like us rougher 
folk. It was David Copperfield, you recall, who 
dined with an undertaker and his family — in the 



ON LIVELIHOODS 77 

room, no doubt, next to the coffin storage — and he 
remarked at the time how cheerfully the joint went 
round. One of this sober cloth, moreover, has con- 
fided to me that they let themselves loose, above aU 
professions, in their reunions and conventions. If 
an unusual riot issues from the door and a gay fellow 
goes walking on the table it is sure that either 
lawyers or undertakers sit inside. 

For myself, if I were to become a merchant, I 
would choose a shop at a four-corners in the country, 
and I would stock from shoe-laces to plows. There 
is no virtue in keeping store in the city. It is merely 
by favor that customers show themselves. Candidly, 
your competitor can better supply their wants. This 
is not so at the four-corners. Nor is anyone a more 
influential citizen than a country merchant. He sets 
the style in calicoes. He judges between check and 
stripe. His decision against a high heel flattens the 
housewives by an inch. But if I kept such a country 
store, I would provide an open fire and, when the 
shadows lengthened, an easy chair or two for gossips. 

I was meditating lately on these strange prefer- 
ences in livelihoods and was gazing through the city 
windows for any clue when I was reminded of a 
tempting scheme that Wee Jessie — a delightful Scots- 
woman of my acquaintance — has planned for several 
of us. 

We are to be traveling merchants for a season, with 
a horse and wagon or a motor. My own preference 



78 CHIMNEY-POT PAPERS 

is a motor, and already I see a vehicle painted in 
bright colors and opening up behind as spacious as 
a waffle cart. There will be windows all around for 
the display of goods. It is not quite fixed what we 
shall sell. Wee Jessie leans toward bonnets and little 
millinery odds and ends. I am for kitchen tins. 

M inclines toward drygoods, serviceable fabrics. 

It is thought that we shall live on the roof while on 
tour, with a canvas to draw on wet nights. We shall 
possess a horn — on which Wee Jessie once practiced 
in her youth — ^to gather up the crowd when we enter 
a village. 

Fancy us, therefore, my dear sir, as taking the 
road late this coming spring in time to spread the 
summer's fashions. And if you hear our horn at 
twilight in your village — a tune of more wind than 
melody, unless Jessie shall cure her imperfections — 
know that on the morrow, by the pump, we shall 
display our wares. 




The Tread of the Friendly Giants. 

When our Babe he goeth walking in his garden, 
Around his tinkling feet the sunbeams play. 

IT has been my fortune to pass a few days where 
there lives a dear little boy of less than three. 
My first knowledge of him every morning is the 
smothered scuffling through the partition as he 
reluctantly splashes in his bath. Here, unless he 
mend his caution, I fear he will never learn to play 
the porpoise at the Zoo. Then there is a wee tapping 
at my door. It is a fairy sound as though Mustard- 
seed were in the hall. Or it might be Pease-blossom 
rousing up Cobweb in the play, to repel the red- 
hipped humble-bee. It is so slight a tapping that 
if I sleep with even one ear inside the covers I will 
not hear it. 

The little lad stands in the dim passage to greet 
me, fully dressed, to reproach me with my tardiness. 



80 CHIMNEY-POT PAPERS 

He is a mite of a fellow, but he is as wide awake and 
shiny as though he were a part of the morning and 
had been wrought delicately out of the dawn's first 
ray. Indeed, I choose to fancy that the sun, being 
off hurriedly on broader business, has made him his 
agent for the premises. Particularly he assists in this 
passage at my bedroom door where the sleepy Night, 
which has not yet caught the summons, still stretches 
and nods beyond the turn. It is so dark here on a 
winter's morning when the nursery door is shut that 
even an adventuring sunlight, if it chanced to clamber 
through the window, would blink and falter in the 
hazard of these turns. But the sun has sent a sub- 
stitute better than himself: for is there not a shaft 
of light along the floor? It can hardly fall from the 
window or anywhere from the outside world. 

The little lad stands in the passage demanding that 
I get up. "Get up, lazybones!" he says. Pretty 
language to his elders ! He speaks soberly, halting 
on each syllable of the long and difficult word. He 
is so solemn that the jest is doubled. And now he 
runs off, jouncing and stiff-legged to his nursery. 
I hear him dragging his animals from his ark, telling 
them all that they are lazybones, even his barking 
dog and roaring lion. Noah, when he saw on that 
first morning that his ark was grounded on Ararat, 
did not rouse his beasts so early to leave the ship. 

Later I meet the lad at breakfast, locked in his 
high chair. In these riper hours of day there is less 



TREAD OF THE FRIENDLY GIANTS 81 

of Cobweb in his composition. He is now every inch 
a boy. He raps his spoon upon his tray. He hiu-ls 
food in the general direction of his mouth. If an 
ear escape the assault it is gunnery beyond the 
common. He is bibbed against misadventure. This 
morning he yearns loudly for muffins, which he calls 
"bums." He chooses those that are unusually brown 
with a smudge of the cooking-tin, and these he calls 
"dirty bums." 

Such is my nephew — a round-cheeked, blue-eyed 
rogue who takes my thumb in all his fingers when 
we go walking. His jumpers are slack behind and 
they wag from side to side in an inexpressibly funny 
manner, but this I am led to believe springs not from 
any special genius but is common to all children. 
It is only recently that he learned to walk, for al- 
though he was forward with his teeth and their early 
sprouting ran in gossip up the street, yet he lagged 
in locomotion. Previously he advanced most surely 
on his seat — ^his slider, as he called it — throwing out 
his legs and curling them in under so as to draw him 
after. By this means he attained a fine speed upon 
a slippery floor, but. he chafed upon a carpet. His 
mother and I agreed that this was quite an unusual 
method and that it presaged some rare talent for his 
future, as the scorn of a rattle is said to predict a 
judge. It was during one of these advances across 
the kitchen floor where the boards are rough that an 
accident occurred. As he excitedly put it, with a 



CHIMNEY-POT PAPERS 



fitting gesture to the rear, he got a sliver in his slider. 
But now he goes upon his feet with a waddle like a 
sailor, and he wags his slider from side to side. 

Sometimes we play at hide-and-seek and we pop 
out at one another from behind the sofa. He lacks 
ingenuity in this, for he always hides in the same 
place. I have tempted him for variety to stow him- 
self in the woodbox. Or the pantry would hold him 
if he squeezed in among the brooms. Nor does my 
ingenuity surpass his, for regularly in a certain order 
I shake the curtains at the door and spy under the 
table. I stir the wastebasket and peer within the 
vases, although they would hardly hold his shoe. 
Then when he is red-hot to be found and is already 
peeking impatiently around the sofa, at last I cry out 
his discovery and we begin all over again. 

I play ball with him and bounce it off his head, a 
game of more mirth in the acting than in the telling. 
Or we squeeze his animals for the noises that they 
make. His lion in particular roars as though lungs 
were its only tenant. But chiefly I am fast in his 
friendship because I ride upon his bear. I take the 
door at a gallop. I rear at the turn. I fall off in 
my most comical fashion. Sometimes I manage to 
kick over his blocks ; at which we call it a game, and 
begin again. He has named the bear in my honor. 

We start all of our games again just as soon as we 
have finished them. That is what a game is. And if it 
is worth playing at all, it is worth endless repetition. 



TREAD OF THE FRIENDLY GIANTS 83 

If I strike a rich deep tone upon the Burmese gong, 
I must continue to strike upon it until I can draw his 
attention to something else. Once, the cook, hearing 
the din, thought that I hinted for my dinner. Being 
an obliging creature, she fell into such a flurry and 
so stirred her pans to push the cooking forward, that 
presently she burned the meat. 

Or if I moo like a cow, I must moo until sunset. 
I rolled off the sofa once to distract him when the 
ugly world was too much with him. Immediately he 
brightened from his complaint and demanded that 
I do it once more. And lately, when a puppy bounced 
out of the house next door and, losing its footing, 
rolled heels over head to the bottom of the steps, at 
once he pleaded for an encore. To him all the 
world's a stage. 

My nephew observes me closely to see what kind 
of fellow I am. I study him, too. He watches me 
over the top of his mug at breakfast and I stare back 
at him over my coffee cup. If I wrinkle my nose, he 
wrinkles his. If I stick out my tongue, he sticks his 
out, too. He answers wink with wink. When I pet 
his woolly lamb, however, he seems to wonder at my 
absurdity. When I wind up his steam engine, cer- 
tainly he suspects that I am a novice. He shows a 
disregard of my castles, and although I build them 
on the windy vantage of a chair, with dizzy battle- 
ments topping all the country, he brushes them into 
ruin. 



CHIMNEY-POT PAPERS 



Sometimes I fancy that his glance is mixed with 
scorn, and that he considers my attempts to amuse 
him as rather a silly business. I wonder what he 
thinks about when he looks at me seriously. I can- 
not doubt his wisdom. He seems to resemble a 
philosopher who has traveled to us from a distant 
world. If he cast me a sentence from Plato, I would 
say, "Master, I listen." Is it Greek he speaks, or a 
dark language from a corner of the sky? He has a 
far-off look as though he saw quite through these 
superficial affairs of earth. His eyes have borrowed 
the color of his wanderings and they are as blue as 
the depths beyond the moon. And I think of another 
child, somewhat older than himself, whose tin sol- 
diers these many years are rusted, a thoughtful silent 
child who was asked, once upon a time, what he did 
when he got to bed. "Gampaw," he replied, "I lies 
and lies, Gampaw, and links and links, 'til I know 
mos' everysin'." The snow of a few winters, the sun 
of summer, the revolving stars and seasons — until 
this lad now serves in France. 

My nephew, although he too roams these distant 
spaces of philosophic thought and brings back strange 
unexpected treasure, has not arrived at the age of 
mere terrestrial exploration. He is quite ignorant of 
his own house and has no curiosity about the back 
stairs — the back stairs that go winding darkly from 
the safety of the kitchen. Scarcely is the fizzing of 
dinner lost than a new strange world engulfs one. 



TREAD OF THE FRIENDLY GIANTS 85 

He is too young to know that a doorway in the dark 
is the portal of adventure. He does not know the 
mystery and the twistings of the cellar, or the shadows 
of the upper hallway and the dim hollows that grow 
and spread across the twilight. 

Dear lad, there is a sunny world beyond the garden 
gate, cities and rolling hills and far-off rivers with 
white sails going up and down. There are wide 
oceans, and ships with tossing lights, and islands set 
with palm trees. And there are stars above your roof 
for you to wonder at. But also, nearer home, there 
are gentle shadows on the stairs, a dim cellar for the 
friendly creatures of your fancy, and for your exalted 
mood there is a garret with dark corners. Here, on 
a braver morning, you may push behind the trunks 
and boxes and come to a land unutterable where the 
furthest Crusoe has scarcely ventured. Or in a more 
familiar hour you may sit alongside a window high 
above the town. Here you will see the milkman on 
his rounds with his pails and long tin dipper. And 
these misty kingdoms that open so broadly on the 
world are near at hand. They are yours if you dare 
to go adventuring for them. 

Soon your ambition will leap its nursery barriers. 
No longer will you be content to sit inside this quiet 
room and pile your blocks upon the floor. You will 
be off on discovery of the long trail that lies along 
the back hall and the pantry where the ways are dark. 
You will wander in search of the caverns that lie 



86 CHIMNEY-POT PAPERS 

beneath the stairs when the night has come. You 
will trudge up steps and down for any lurking ocean 
on which to sail your pirate ships. Already I see you 
gazing with wistful eyes into the spaces beyond the 
door — into the days of your great adventure. In 
your thought is the patter and scurry of new crea- 
tion. It is almost fairy time for you. The tread of 
the friendly giants, still far off, is sounding in the 
dark. . . . 

Dear little lad, in this darkness may there be no 
fear! For these shadows of the twilight — which too 
long have been chased like common miscreants with 
lamp and candle — are really friendly beings and they 
wait to romp with you. Because thieves have walked 
in darkness, shall darkness be called a thief? Rather, 
let the dark hours take their repute from the count- 
less gracious spirits that are abroad — the quieter 
fancies that flourish when the light has gone — ^the 
gentle creatures that leave their hiding when the sun 
has set. When a rug lies roughened at close of day, 
it is said truly that a fairy peeps from under to learn 
if at last the house is safe. And they hide in the 
hallway for the signal of your coming, yet so timid 
that if the fire is stirred they scamper beyond the 
turn. They huddle close beneath the stairs that they 
may listen to your voice. They come and go on tip- 
toe when the curtain sways, in the hope that you will 
follow. With their long thin shadowy fingers they 
beckon for you beneath the sofa. 



TREAD OF THE FRIENDLY GIANTS 87 

The time is coming when you can no longer resist 
their invitation, when you will leave your woolly 
lamb and your roaring lion on this dull safe hearth 
and will go on pilgrimage. The back stairs sit 
patient in the dark for your hand upon the door. 
The great dim garret that has sat nodding for so 
many years will smile at last at your coming. It has 
been lonely so long for the glad sound of running 
feet and laughter. It has been childless so many 
years. 

But once children's feet played there and romped 
through the short winter afternoons. A rope hung 
from post to post and furnished forth a circus. Here 
giant swings were hazarded. Here children hung 
from the knees until their marbles and other wealth 
dropped from their pockets. And for less ambitious 
moments there were toys — 

The little toy dog is covered with dust, 

But sturdy and stanch he stands ; 

And the little toy soldier is red with rust, 

And his musket moulds in his hands. 

Time was when the little toy dog was new. 

And the soldier was passing fair; 

And that was the time when our Little Boy Blue 

Kissed them and put them there. 

And now Little Boy Blue again climbs the long 
stairs. He stretches up on tiptoe to turn the door- 
knob at the top. He listens as a prudent explorer 
should. Cook rattles her tins below, but it is a far- 



88 CHIMNEY-POT PAPERS 

off sound as from another world. Somewhere, doubt- 
less, the friendly milkman's bell goes jingling up the 
street. There is a distant barking of familiar dogs. 
Will it not be better to return to the safe regions and 
watch the traffic from the window? But here, beck- 
oning, is the great adventure. 

The brave die is cast. He advances with out- 
stretched arms into the darkness. Suddenly, behind 
him, the door swings shut. The sound of cooking- 
tins is lost. Silence. Silence, except for branches 
scratching on the roof. But the garret hears the 
sound of feet, and it rouses itself and rubs its dusky 
eyes. 

But when darkness thickens and the sunlight has 
vanished from the floor, then comes the magic hour. 
The garret then tears from its eyes the blind bandage 
of the day. Strange creatures lift their heads. And 
now, as you wait expectant, there comes a mysterious 
sound from the darkest corner. Is it a mouse that 
stirs? Rather, it seems a far-off sound, as though a 
blind man, tapping with his stick, walked on the 
margin of the world. The noise comes near. It gains 
in volume. It is close at hand. Dear lad, you have 
come upon the magic hour. It is the tread of the 
friendly giants that is sounding in the dark. . . . 



On Spending a Holiday. 

AT a party lately a worn subject came under 
discussion. 
Our host lives in a triangular stone-paved 
courtyard tucked off from the thoroughfare but with 
the rattle of the elevated railway close at hand.^ The 
building is of decent brick, three stories in height, 
and it exhibits to the courtyard a row of identical 
doorsteps. The entrance to the courtyard is a swing- 
ing shutter between buildings facing on the street, 
and it might seem a mystery — like the apple in the 
dimipling — ^how the building inside squeezed through 
so narrow an entrance. Yet here it is, with a rubber 
plant in one corner and a trellis for imaginary vines 
in the other. 

In this courtyard. Pomander Walk might be 
acted along the stoops. For a necessary stage prop- 
erty — you recall, of course, the lamplighter with his 
ladder in the second act! — ^there is a gas lamp of old 
design in the middle of the enclosure, up near the 
footlights, as it were. From the stoops the main 
comedy might proceed, with certain business at the 
upper windows — ^the profane Admiral with the tim- 
ber leg popping his head out of one, the mysterious 
fat man — in some sort the villain of the piece — 
putting his head out of another to woo the buxom 



90 CHIMNEY-POT PAPERS 

widow at a third. And then the muffin man! In 
the twihght when the lamp is lighted and the heroine 
at last is in the hero's arms, there would be a pleasant 
crunching of muffins at all the windows as the curtain 
falls. 

But I shall not drop even a hint as to the location 
of this courtyard. Many persons think that New 
York City is but a massive gridiron, and they are 
ignorant of the nooks and quirks and angles of the 
lower town. Enough that the Indian of a modest 
tobacconist guards the swinging shutter of the en- 
trance to the courtyard. 

Here we sat in the very window I had designed for 
the profane Admiral, and talked in the quiet interval 
between trains. 

One of our company — a man whom I shall call 
Flint — ^was hardy enough to say that he never em- 
ployed his leisure in going to the country — that a 
walk about the city streets was his best refreshment. 
Flint's livelihood is cotton. He is a dumpish sort 
of person who looks as if he needed exercise, but he 
has a sharp clear eye. At first his remark fell on us 
as a mere perversity, as of one who proclaims a 
humorous whim. And yet he adhered tenaciously 
to his opinion, urging smooth pavements against 
mud, the study of countless faces against the song of 
birds and great buildings against cliffs. 

Another of our company opposed him in this — 
Colum, who chafes as an accountant. Colum is a 



ON SPENDING A HOLIDAY 91 

gentle dreamy fellow who likes birds. All winter he 
saves his tobacco tins which, in his two weeks' vaca- 
tion in the country, he sets up in trees as birdhouses. 
He confesses that he took up with a certain brand 
of tobacco because its receptacle is popular with 
wrens. Also he cultivated a taste for waffles — which 
at first by a sad distortion of nature he lacked — for 
no other reason except that syrup may be bought in 
pretty log-cabin tins particularly suited for bluebirds. 
If you chance to breakfast with him, he urges the 
syrup on you with pleasant and insistent hospitality. 
With satisfaction he drains a can. By June he has 
a dozen of these empty cabins on the shelf alongside 
his country boots. Time was when he was lean of 
girth — as becomes an accountant, who is hinged 
dyspeptically all day across his desk — but by this 
agreeable stowage he has now grown to plumpness. 
When in the country Colum rises early in order to 
stretch the pleasures of the day, and he walks about 
before breakfast from tree to tree to view his feath- 
ered tenants. He has even acquired, after much 
practice, the knack of chirping — a hissing conjunc- 
tion of the lips and teeth — which he is confident wins 
the friendly attention of the birds. 

Flint heard Colum impatiently, and interrupted 
before he was done. "Pooh!" he said. "There's mud 
in the country, and not much of any plumbing, and 
in the morning it's cold until you light a fire." 

"Of course," said Colum. "But I love it. Perhaps 



CHIMNEY-POT PAPERS 



you remember, Flint, the old willow stump out near 
the road. I put a Barking Dog on top of it, and now 
there's a family of wrens inside." 

"Nonsense," said Flint. "There is too much cli- 
mate in the coimtry — ^much more than in town. It's 
either too hot or too cold. And it's lonely. As for 
you, Colum, you're sentimental about your bird- 
houses. And you dislike your job. You like the 
country merely because it is a symbol of a holiday. 
It is freedom from an irksome task. It means a 
closing of your desk. But if you had to live in the 
country, you would grumble in a month's time. Even 
a bullfrog — and he is brought up to it, poor wretch — 
croaks at night." 

Colum interrupted. "That's not true, Flint. I 
know I'd like it — to live on a farm and keep chickens. 
Sometimes in winter, or more often in spring, I can 
hardly wait for summer and my two weeks. I look 
out of the window and I see a mirage — ^trees and 
hills." Colum sighed. "It's quite wonderful, that 
view, but it unsettles me for my ledger." 

"That's it," broke in Flint. "Your sentimentality 
spoils your happiness. You let two weeks poison the 
other fifty. It's immoral." 

Colum was about to retort, when he was antici- 
pated by a new speaker. It was Quill, the journalist, 
who has long thin fingers and indigestion. At meals 
he pecks suspiciously at his plate, and he eats food 
substitutes. Quill runs a financial supplement, or 



ON SPENDING A HOLIDAY 



something of that kind, to a daily paper. He always 
knows whether Steel is strong and whether Copper 
is up or down. If you call on him at his office, he 
glances at you for a moment before he knows you. 
Yet in his slippers he grows human. 

"I like the country, too," he interposed, "and no 
one ever said that I am sentimental." He tapped 
his head. "I'm as hard as nails up here." Quill 
cracked his knuckles in a disagreeable habit he has, 
and continued: "I have a shack on the West Shore, 
and I go there week-ends. My work is so confining 
that if I didn't get to the country once in a while, I 
would play out in a jiffy. I'm a nervous frazzle — a 
nervous frazzle — by Saturday noon. But I lie on 
the grass all Sunday, and if nobody snaps at me and 
I am let alone, by Monday morning I am fit again." 

"You must be like Antaeus." 

This remark came from Wurm, our host. Wurm 
is a bookish fellow who wears great rimmed glasses. 
He spends much of his time in company thinking up 
apposite quotations and verifying them. He has 
worn out two Bartlett's. Wurm is also addicted to 
maps and dictionaries, and is a great reader of special 
articles. Consequently his mind is a pound for stray 
collarless facts; or rather, in its variety of contents, 
it more closely resembles a building contractor's 
back yard — odd salvage — rejected doors — a job of 
window-frames — a pile of bricks for chipping — dis- 
carded plumbing — broken junk gathered here and 



9i CHIMNEY-POT PAPERS 

there. Mr. Aust himself, a building contractor who 
once lived on our street — a man of no broad fame — 
quite local — surely unknown to you — did not collect 
so wide a rubbish. 

However, despite these qualities, Wurm is rather 
a pleasant and harmless bit of cobweb. For a liveli- 
hood, he sits in a bank behind a grill. At noon he 
eats his lunch in his cage, and afterwards with a 
rubber band he snaps at the flies. In the hunting 
season he kills in a day as many as a dozen of these 
pests and ranges them in his pen tray. On Saturday 
afternoons he rummages in Malkan's and the second- 
hand bookshops along Fourth Avenue. To see 
Wurm in his most characteristic pose, is to see him 
on a ladder, with one leg outstretched, far off his bal- 
ance, fumbling for a title with his finger tips. Surely, 
in these dull alcoves, gravity nods on its job. Then 
he buys a sour red apple at the corner and pelts home 
to dinner. This is served him on a tin tray by his 
stout landlady who comes puffing up the stairs. It 
is a bit of pleasant comedy that whatever dish is 
served happens to be the very one of which he was 
thinking as he came out of the bank. By this inno- 
cent device he is popular with his landlady and she 
skims the milk for him. 

Wurm rapped his pipe bowl on the arm of his 
chair. "You must be like Antaeus," he replied. 

"Like what?" asked Flint. 

"Ant sens — the fellow who wrestled with Her- 



ON SPENDING A HOLIDAY 95 

cules. Each time that Antaeus was thrown against 
the earth his strength was doubled. He was finally 
in the way of overcoming Hercules, when Hercules 
by seizing him around the middle lifted him off the 
ground. By this strategy he deprived him of all con- 
tact with the earth, and presently Antseus weakened 
and was vanquished." 

"That's me," said Quill, the journalist. "If I 
can't get back to my shack on Sunday, I feel that 
Hercules has me, too, around the middle." 

"Perhaps I can find the story," said Wurm, his eye 
running toward the bookshelves. 

"Don't bother," said Flint. 

There was now another speaker — Flannel Shirt, 
as we called him — who had once been sated with 
formal dinners and society, and is now inclined to 
cry them down. He leans a bit toward socialism and 
free verse. He was about to praise the country for 
its freedom from sordidness and artificiality, when 
Flint, who had heard him before, interrupted. 

"Rubbish!" he cried out. "All of you, but in dif- 
ferent ways, are slaves to an old tradition kept up by 
Wordsworth, who would himself, doubtless, have 
moved to London except for the steepness of the 
rents. You all maintain that you like the country, 
yet on one excuse or another you live in the city and 
growl about it. There isn't a commuter among you. 
Honest folk, these commuters, with marrow in their 
bones — a steak in a paper bag — the sleet in their faces 



96 CHIMNEY-POT PAPERS 

on the ferryboat. I am the only one who admits that 
he lives in the city because he prefers it. The country 
is good enough to read about — I like it in books — 
but I choose to sit meantime with my feet on a city 
fender." 

Here Wurm broke in again. "I see, Flint," he 
said, "that you have been reading Leslie Stephen." 

Flint denied it. 

"Well, anyway, you have quoted him. Let me 
read you a bit of his essay on 'Country Books.' " 

Flint made a grimace. "Wurm always has a 
favorite passage." 

Wurm went to a shelf and took down a volume. 
He blew off the dust and smoothed its sides. 
"Listen to this!" he said. "Picked up the volume at 
Schulte's, on the twenty-five cent table. *A love of 
the country is taken,' " he read, " *I know not why, 
to indicate the presence of all the cardinal vir- 
tues. . . . We assert a taste for sweet and innocent 
pleasures and an indifference to the feverish excite- 
ments of artificial society. I, too, like the coim- 
try, . . .' (you'll like this, Flint) 'but I confess — to 
be duly modest — that I love it best in books. In real 
life I have remarked that it is frequently damp and 
rheumatic, and most hated by those who know it 
best. . . . Though a cockney in grain, I love to lean 
upon the farmyard gate; to hear Mrs. Poyser give 
a bit of her mind to the squire; to be lulled into a 
placid doze by the humming of Dorlecote Mill ; to sit 



ON SPENDING A HOLIDAY 97 

down in Dandie Dinmont's parlour ... or to drop 
into the kitchen of a good old country inn, and to 
smoke a pipe with Tom Jones or listen to the simple- 
minded philosophy of Parson Adams.' " 

"You hit on a good one then," said Flint. "And 
now as I was saying — " 

Wurm interposed. "Just a moment, Flint! You 
think that that quotation supports your side of the 
discussion. Not at all. It shows merely that some- 
times we get greater reality from books than we get 
from life. Leslie Stephen liked the real countrj^ 
also. In his holidays he chmbed the Swiss moun- 
tains — ^wrote a book about them — ^it's on that top 
shelf. Don't you remember how he loved to roll 
stones off a cliff? And as a pedestrian he was almost 
as famous as George Borrow — walked the shirt off 
his back before his college trustees and all that sort 
of thing. But he got an even sharper reality from 
books. He liked the city, too, but in many a mood, 
there's no doubt about it, he preferred to walk to 
Charing Cross with Doctor Johnson in a book, 
rather than to jostle on the actual pavement outside 
his door." 

"Speed up, Wurm!" This from Quill, the jour- 
nalist. "Inch along, old caterpillar!" 

"As far as I am concerned," Wurm continued, "I 
would rather go with Charles and Mary Lamb to see 
The Battle of Heocliam in their gallery than to any 
show in Times Square. I love to think of that fine 



98 CHIMNEY-POT PAPERS 

old pair climbing up the stairs, carefully at the turn, 
lest they tread on a neighbor's heels. Then the 
pleasant gallery, with its great lantern to light their 
expectant faces!" 

Wurm's eyes strayed again wistfully to his shelves. 
Flint stayed him. "And so you think that it is pos- 
sible to see life completely in a mirror." 

"By no means," Wurm returned. "We must see 
it both ways. Nor am I, as you infer, in any sense 
like the Lady of Shalott. A great book cannot be 
compared to a mirror. There is no genius in a mirror. 
It merely reflects the actual, and slightly darkened. 
A great book shows life through the medium of an 
individuality. The actual has been lifted into truth. 
Divinity has passed into it through the unobstructed 
channel of genius." 

Here Flint broke in. "Divinity — genius — the 
Swiss Alps — The Battle of Hexham — what have they 
to do with Quill's shack out in Jersey or Colum's 
dirty birdhouses? You jump the track, Wurm. 
When everybody is heading for the main tent, you 
keep running to the side-shows." 

Quill, the journalist, joined the banter. "You re- 
mind me, Wurm — I hate to say it — of what a sea 
captain once said to me when I tried to loan him a 
book. 'Readin',' he said, *readin' rots the mind.' " 

It was Colum's turn to ask a question. "What do 
you do, Flint," he asked, "when you have a holiday?" 

"Me? Well, I don't run off to the country as if 



ON SPENDING A HOLIDAY 99 

the city were afire and my coat-tails smoked. And 
I don't sentimentalize on the evils of society. And 
I don't sit and blink in the dark, and moon around 
on a shelf and wear out books. I go outdoors. I 
walk around and look at things — shop windows and 
all that, when the merchants leave their curtains up. 
I walk across the bridges and spit off. Then there's 
the Bronx and the Battery, with benches where one 
may make acquaintances. People are always more 
communicative when they look out on the water. 
The last time I sat there an old fellow told me about 
himself, his wife, his victrola and his saloon. I talk 
to a good many persons, first and last, or I stand 
around until they talk to me. So many persons wear 
blinders in the city. They don't know how wonderful 
it is. Once, on Christmas Eve, I pretended to shop 
on Fourteenth Street, just to listen to the crowd on 
its final round — ^mother's carpet sweeper, you under- 
stand, or a drum for the heir. A crowd on Christmas 
is different — it's gayer — reckless — it's an exalted 
Saturday night. Afterwards I heard Midnight Mass 
at the Russian Cathedral. Then there are always 
ferryboats — the band on the boat to Staten Island- 
God! What music! Tugs and lights. I would like 
to know a tug — intimately. If more people were 
like tugs we'd have less rotten politics. Wall Street 
on a holiday is fascinating. No one about. Desolate. 
But full of spirits." 

Flint took a fresh cigar. "Last Sunday morning 



100 CHIMNEY-POT PAPERS 

I walked in Central Park. There were all manner 
of toy sailboats on the pond — big and little — ^thirty 
of them at the least — ^tipping and running in the 
breeze. Grown men sail them. They set them on a 
course, and then they trot around the pond and wait 
for them. Presently I was curious. A man upward 
of fifty had his boat out on the grass and was adjust- 
ing the rigging. 

" ^That's quite a boat,' I began. 

" 'It's not a bad tub,' he answered. 

" *Do you hire it from the park department?' I 
asked. 

" *No!' with some scorn. 

" 'Where do you buy them?' 

" *We don't buy them.' 

" 'Then how—?' I started. 

" 'We make 'em — nights.' 

"He resumed his work. The boat was accurately 
and beautifully turned — ^hollow inside — ^with a deck 
of glossy wood. The rudder was controlled by finest 
tackle and hardware. Altogether, it was as delicately 
wrought as a violin. 

" 'It's this way!' — its builder and skipper laid 
down his pipe — 'There are about thirty of us boys 
who are dippy about boats. We can't afford real 
boats, so we make these little ones. Daytimes I am 
an interior decorator. This is a thirty-six. Next 
winter — if my wife will stand the muss (My God! 
How it litters up the dining-room!) I am going to 



ON SPENDING A HOLIDAY 101 

build a forty-two. All of the boys bring out a new 
boat each spring!' The old fellow squinted at his 
mast and tightened a cord. Then he continued. *If 
you are interested, come around any Sunday morning 
until the pond is frozen. And if you want to try 
your hand at a boat this winter, just ask any of us 
boys and we will help you. Your first boat or two 
will be sad — Ju - das! But you will learn.' " 

Flint was interrupted by Quill. "Isn't that rather 
a silly occupation for grown men?" 

"It's not an occupation," said Flint. "It's an avo- 
cation, and it isn't silly. Any one of us would enjoy 
it, if he weren't so self-conscious. And it's more 
picturesque than golf and takes more skill. And 
what courtesy! These men form what is really a 
club — a club in its primitive and true sense. And I 
was invited to be one of them." 

Flannel Shirt broke in. "By George, that was 
courtesy. If you had happened on a polo player at 
his club — a man not known to you — he wouldn't have 
invited you to come around and bring your pony for 
instruction." 

"It's not an exact comparison, is it, Old Flannel 
Shirt?" 

"No, maybe not." 

There was a pause. It was Flint who resumed. 
"I rather like to think of that interior decorator litter- 
ing up his dining-room every night — clamps and glue- 
pots on the sideboard — ^hardly room for the sugar- 



102 CHIMNEY-POT PAPERS 

bowl — lumber underneath — and then bringing out a 
new boat in the spring." 

Wurm looked up from the couch. "Stevenson," 
he said, "should have known that fellow. He would 
have found him a place among his Lantern Bearers." 

Flint continued. "From the pond I walked down 
Fifth Avenue." 

"It's Fifth Avenue," said Flannel Shirt, "every- 
thing up above Fifty-ninth Street — and what it 
stands for, that I want to get away from." 

"Easy, Flannel Shirt," said Flint. "Fifth Avenue 
doesn't interest me much either. It's too lonely. 
Everybody is always away. The big stone buildings 
aren't homes: they are points of departure, as some- 
body called them. And they were built for kings 
and persons of spacious lives, but they have been sub- 
let to smaller folk. Or does no one live inside ? You 
never see a curtain stir. There is never a face at a 
window. Everything is stone and dead. One might 
think that a Gorgon had gone riding on a 'bus top, 
and had thrown his cold eye upon the house fronts." 
Flint paused. "How can one live obscurely, as these 
folk do, in the twilight, in so beautiful a shell? Even 
a crustacean sometimes shows his nose at his door. 
And yet what a wonderful street it would be if per- 
sons really lived there, and looked out of their win- 
dows, and sometimes, on clear days, hung their 
tapestries and rugs across the outer walls. Actually," 



ON SPENDING A HOLIDAY 103 

added Flint, "I prefer to walk on the East Side. It 
is gayer." 

"There is poverty, of course," he went on after a 
moment, "and suffering. But the streets are not 
depressing. They have fun on the East Side. There 
are so many children and there is no loneliness. If 
the street is blessed with a standpipe, it seems de- 
signed as a post for leaping. Any vacant wall — if 
the street is so lucky — serves for a game. There is 
baseball on the smooth pavement, or if one has a piece 
of chalk, he can lay out a kind of hopscotch — not 
stretched out, for there isn't room, but rolled up like 
a jelly cake. One must hop to the middle and out 
again. Or perhaps one is an artist and with a crayon 
he spends his grudge upon an enemy — these drawings 
can be no likeness of a friend. Or love guides the 
chalky fingers. And all the time slim-legged girls 
sit on curb and step and act as nursemaids to the 
younger fry." 

"But, my word, what smells!" 

"Yes, of course, and not very pleasant smells. 
Down on these streets we can learn what dogs think 
of us. But every Saturday night on Grand Street 
there is a market. I bought a tumbler of little nuts 
from an old woman. They aren't much good to eat — 
wee nuts, all shell — and they still sit in the kitchen 
getting dusty. It was raining when I bought them 
and the woman's hair was streaked in her face, but she 
didn't mind. There were pent roofs over all the carts. 



lOi, CHIMNEY-POT PAPERS 

Everything on God's earth was for sale. On the cart 
next to my old woman's, there was hardware — 
sieves, cullenders — kitchen stuff. And on the next, 
wearing gear, with women's stockings hung on a rope 
at the back. A girl came along carrying a pair of 
champagne-colored shoes, looking for stockings to 
match. Quite a belle. Somebody's girl. Quill, go 
down there on a Saturday night. It will make a 
column for your paper. I wonder if that girl found 
her stockings. A black-eyed Italian. 

"But what I like best are the windows on the East 
Side. No one there ever says that his house is his 
castle. On the contrary it is his point of vantage — 
his outlook — ^his prospect. His house front never 
dozes. Windows are really windows, places to look 
out of — ^not openings for household exhibits — orna- 
mental lamps or china things — at every window there 
is a head — somebody looking on the world. There is 
a pleasant gossip across the fire-escapes — a recipe 
for onions — a hint of fashion — a cure for rheuma- 
tism. The street bears the general life. The home 
is the street, not merely the crowded space within four 
walls. The street is the playground and the club — 
the common stage, and these are the galleries and 
boxes. We come again close to the beginning of 
the modern theatre — an innyard with windows round 
about. The play is shinny in the gutters. Venders 
come and go, selling fruit and red suspenders. An 



ON SPENDING A HOLIDAY 105 

ice wagon clatters off, with a half-dozen children on 
its tailboard." 

Flint flecked his ashes on the floor. "I wonder," 
he said at length, "that those persons who try to tempt 
these people out of the congested city to farms, don't 
see how falsely they go about it. They should repro- 
duce the city in miniature — a dozen farmhouses must 
be huddled together to make a snug little town, where 
all the children may play and where the women, as 
they work, may talk across the windows. They must 
build villages like the farming towns of France. 

"But where can one be so stirred as on the wharves? 
From here even the narrowest fancy reaches out to 
the four watery corners of the earth. No nose is so 
green and country-bred that it doesn't sniff the spices 
of India. Great ships lie in the channel camouflaged 
with war. If we could forget the terror of the sub- 
marine, would not these lines and stars and colors 
appear to us as symbols of the strange mystery of 
the far-off seas? 

"Or if it is a day of sailing, there are a thousand 
barrels, oil maybe, ranged upon the wharf, standing 
at fat attention to go aboard. Except for numbers 
it might appear — although I am rusty at the legend — 
that in these barrels Ali Baba has hid his forty thieves 
for roguery when the ship is out to sea. Doubtless 
if one knocked upon a top and put his ear close upon 
a barrel, he would hear a villain's guttural voice in- 
side, asking if the time were come. 



106 CHIMNEY-POT PAPERS 

*'Then there are the theatres and parks, great 
caverns where a subway is being built. There are 
geraniums on window-sills, wash hanging on dizzy- 
lines (cotton gymnasts practicing for a circus) , a roar 
of traffic and shrill whistles, men and women eating — 
always eating. There has been nothing like this in 
all the ages. Babylon and Nineveh were only vil- 
lages. Carthage was a crossroads. It is as though 
all the cities of antiquity had packed their bags and 
moved here to a common spot." 

"Please, Flint," this from Colum, "but you forget 
that the faces of those who live in the country are 
happier. That's all that counts." 

"Not happier — less alert, that's all — duller. For 
contentment, I'll wager against any farmhand the 
old woman who sells apples at the corner. She pol- 
ishes them on her apron with — with spit. There is 
an Italian who peddles ice from a handcart on our 
street, and he never sees me without a grin. The folk 
who run our grocery, a man and his wife, seem happy 
all the day. No! we misjudge the city and we have 
done so since the days of Wordsworth. If we prized 
the city rightly, we would be at more pains to make 
it better — to lessen its suffering. We ought to go 
into the crowded parts with an eye not only for the 
poverty, but also with sympathy for its beauty — its 
love of sunshine — ^the tenderness with which the elder 
children guard the younger — its love of music — its 
dancing — its naturalness. If we had this sympathy 



ON SPENDING A HOLIDAY 107 

we could help — ourselves, first — and after that, 
maybe, the East Side." 

Flint arose and leaned against the chimney. He 
shook an accusing finger at the company. "You, 
Colum, ruin fifty weeks for the sake of two. You, 
Quill, hypnotize yourself into a frazzle by Saturday 
noon with unnecessary fret. You peck over your 
food too much. A little clear unmuddled thinking 
would straighten you out, even if you didn't let the 
ants crawl over you on Sunday afternoon. Old 
Flannel Shirt is blinded by his spleen against society. 
As for Wurm, he doesn't count. He's only a harm- 
less bit of mummy- wrapping." 

"And what are you, Flint?" asked Quill. 

"Me? A rational man, I hope." 

"You — you are an egotist. That's what you are." 

"Very well," said Flint. "It's just as you say." 

There was a red flash from the top of the Metro- 
politan Tower. Flint looked at his watch. "So?" 
he said, "I must be going." 

And now that our party is over and I am home at 
last, I put out the light and draw open the curtains. 
Tomorrow — it is to be a holiday — I had planned to 
climb in the Highlands, for I, too, am addicted to the 
country. But perhaps — perhaps I'll change my plan 
and stay in town. I'll take a hint from Flint. I'll 
go down to Delancey Street and watch the chaffering 
and buying. What he said was true. He overstated 
his position, of course. Most propagandists do, being 



108 CHIMNEY-POT PAPERS 

swept off in the current of their swift conviction. 
One should like both the city and the country; and 
the liking for one should heighten the liking for the 
other. Any particular receptiveness must grow to 
be a general receptiveness. Yet, in the main, cer- 
tainly, Flint was right. I'll try Delancey Street, I 
concluded, just this once. 

Thousands of roofs lie below me, for I live in a 
tower as of Teufelsdrockh. And many of them 
shield a bit of grief — darkened rooms where sick folk 
lie — rooms where hope is faint. And yet, as I believe, 
under these roofs there is more joy than grief — ^more 
contentment and happiness than despair, even in 
these grievous times of war. If Quill here frets him- 
self into wakefulness and Colum chafes for the 
coming of the summer, also let us remember that in 
the murk and shadows of these rooms there are, at 
the least, thirty sailors from Central Park — one old 
fellow in particular who, although the hour is late, 
still putters with his boat in the litter of his dining- 
room. Glue-pots on the sideboard! Clamps among 
the china, and lumber on the hearth! And down on 
Grand Street, snug abed, dreaming of pleasant con- 
quest, sleeps the dark-eyed Italian girl. On a chair 
beside her are her champagne boots, with stockings 
to match hung across the back. 



Runaway Studies. 

IN my edition of "Elia," illustrated by Brock, 
whose sympathetic pen, surely, was nibbed in days 
contemporary with Lamb, there is a sketch of a 
youth reclining on a window-seat with a book fallen 
open on his knees. He is clad in a long plain garment 
folded to his heels which carries a hint of a cathedral 
choir but which, doubtless, is the prescribed costume 
of an English public school. This lad is gazing 
through the casement into a sunny garden — for the 
artist's vague stippling invites the suspicion of grass 
and trees. Or rather, does not the intensity of his 
regard attest that his nimble thoughts have jumped 
the outmost wall? Already he journeys to those 
peaks and lofty towers that fringe the world of 
youth — a dizzy range that casts a magic border on his 
first wide thoughts, to be overleaped if he seek to 
tread the stars. 

And yet it seems a sleepy afternoon. Flowers nod 
upon a shelf in the idle breeze from the open casement. 
On the warm sill a drowsy sunlight falls, as if the 
great round orb of day, having labored to the top of 
noon, now dawdled idly on the farther slope. A cat 
dozes with lazy comfort on the window-seat. Surely, 
this is the cat — if the old story be believed — the 



no CHIMNEY-POT PAPERS 

sleepiest of all her race, in whose dull ear the mouse 
dared to nest and breed. 

This lad, who is so lost in thought, is none other 
than Charles Lamb, a mere stripling, not yet grown 
to his black small-clothes and sober gaiters, a shrill 
squeak of a boy scarcely done with his battledore. 
And here he sits, his cheek upon his palm, and dreams 
of the future. 

But Lamb himself has written of this window-seat. 
Journeying northward out of London — in that won- 
derful middle age of his in which the Elia papers were 
composed — journeying northward he came once on 
the great country house where a part of his boyhood 
had been spent. It had been but lately given to the 
wreckers, "and the demolition of a few weeks," he 
writes, "had reduced it to — an antiquity." 

"Had I seen those brick- and-mortar knaves at their 
process of destruction," he continues, "at the pluck- 
ing of every pannel I should have felt the varlets at 
my heart. I should have cried out to them to spare 
a plank at least out of that cheerful store-room, in 
whose hot window-seat I used to sit and read Cow- 
ley, with the grass-plat before, and the hum and flap- 
pings of that one solitary wasp that ever haunted it 
about me — it is in mine ears now, as oft as summer 
returns. ..." 

I confess to a particular enjoyment of this essay, 
with its memory of tapestried bedrooms setting forth 
upon their walls "the unappeasable prudery of 



RUNAWAY STUDIES 111 

Diana" under the peeping eye of Actason; its echoing 
galleries once so dreadful when the night wind caught 
the candle at the turn; its hall of family portraits. 
But chiefly it is this window-seat that holds me — the 
casement looking on the garden and its southern sun- 
baked wall — the lad dreaming on his volume of 
Cowley, and leaping the garden border for the stars. 
These are the things that I admit most warmly to my 
affection. 

It is not in the least that I am a lover of Cowley, 
who seems an unpleasantly antiquated author. I 
would choose, instead, that the youthful Elia were 
busy so early with one of his favorite Elizabethans. 
He has himself hinted that he read "The Vicar of 
Wakefield" in later days out of a tattered copy from 
a circulating hbrary, yet I would willingly move the 
occasion forward, coincident to this. And I suspect 
that the artist Brock is also indifferent to Cowley: 
for has he not laid two other volumes handy on the 
shelf for the sure time when Cowley shall grow dull ? 
Has he not even put Cowley flat down upon his face, 
as if, already neglected, he had slipped from the lad's 
negligent fingers — as if, indeed, Elia's far-striding 
meditation were to him of higher interest than the stiff 
measure of any poet? 

I recall a child, dimly through the years, that lay 
upon the rug before the fire to read his book, with his 
chin resting on both his hands. His favorite hour 
was the winter twilight before the family came 



112 CHIMNEY-POT PAPERS 

together for their supper, for at that hour the lamp- 
lighter went his rounds and threw a golden string of 
dots upon the street. He drove an old thin horse and 
he stood on the seat of the cart with up-stretched 
taper. But when the world grew dark the flare of 
the fire was enough for the child to read, for he lay- 
close against the hearth. And as the shadows 
gathered in the room, there was one story chiefly, of 
such intensity that the excitement of it swept through 
his body and out into his waving legs. Perhaps its 
last copy has now vanished off the earth. It dealt 
with a deserted house on a lonely road, where chains 
clanked at midnight. Lights, too, seemingly not of 
earth, glimmered at the windows, while groans — such 
was the dark fancy of the author — issued from a 
windy tower. But there was one supreme chapter 
in which the hero was locked in a haunted room and 
saw a candle at a chink of the wall. It belonged to 
the villain, who nightly played there a ghostly antic 
to frighten honest folk from a buried treasure. 

And in summer the child read on the casement of 
the dining-room with the window up. It was the 
height of a tall man from the ground, and this gave 
it a bit of dizziness that enhanced the pleasure. This 
sill could be dully reached from inside, but the ap- 
proach from the outside was riskiest and best. For 
an adventuring mood this window was a kind of 
postern to the house for innocent deception, beyond 
the eye of both the sitting-room and cook. Some- 



RUNAWAY STUDIES 113 

times it was the bridge of a lofty ship with a pilot 
going up and down, or it was a lighthouse to mark a 
channel. It was as versatile as the kitchen step- 
ladder which — on Thursday afternoons when the 
cook was out — unbent from its sober household duties 
and joined him as an equal. But chiefly on this sill 
the child read his books on summer days. His cousins 
sat inside on chairs, starched for company, and read 
safe and dimpled authors, but his were of a vagrant 
kind. There was one book, especially, in which a lad 
not much bigger than himself ran from home and 
joined a circus. A scolding aunt was his excuse. 
And the child on the sill chafed at his own happy 
circumstance which denied him these adventures. 

In a dark room in an upper story of the house 
there was a great box where old books and periodicals 
were stored. No place this side of Cimmeria had 
deeper shadows. Not even the underground stall of 
the neighbor's cow, which showed a gloomy window 
on the garden, gave quite the chill. It was only on 
the brightest days that the child dared to rummage 
in this box. The top of it was high and it was blind 
fumbling unless he stood upon a chair. Then he bent 
over, jack-knife fashion, until the upper part of 
him — all above the legs — disappeared. In the ob- 
scurity — ^his head being gone — it must have seemed 
that Solomon lived upon the premises and had carried 
out his ugly threat in that old affair of the disputed 
child. Then he lifted out the papers — in particular 



m CHIMNEY-POT PAPERS 

a set of Leslie's Weekly with battle pictures of the 
Civil War. Once he discovered a tale of Jules 
Verne — a journey to the center of the earth — and he 
spread its chapters before the window in the dusty- 
light. 

But the view was high across the houses of the city 
to a range of hills where tall trees grew as a hedge 
upon the world. And it was the hours when his book 
lay fallen that counted most, for then he built poems 
in his fancy of ships at sea and far-off countries. 

It is by a fine instinct that children thus neglect 
their books, whether it be Cowley or Circus Dick. 
When they seem most truant they are the closest 
rapt. A book at its best starts the thought and sends 
it off as a happy vagrant. It is the thought that runs 
away across the margin that brings back the richest 
treasure. 

But all reading in childhood is not happy. It 
chanced that lately in the long vacation I explored 
a country school for boys. It stood on the shaded 
street of a pretty New England village, so perched 
on a hilltop that it looked over a wide stretch of lower 
country. There were many marks of a healthful out- 
door life — a football field and tennis courts, broad 
lawns and a prospect of distant woodland for a holi- 
day excursion. It was on the steps of one of the 
buildings used for recitation that I found a tattered 
dog-eared remnant of The Merchant of Venice. So 
much of its front was gone that at the very first 



RUNAWAY STUDIES 115 

of it Shylock had advanced far into his unworthy 
schemes. Evidently the book, by its position at the 
corner of the steps, had been thrown out immediately 
at the close of the final class, as if already it had been 
endured too long. 

In the stillness of the abandoned school I sat for 
an hour and read about the choosing of the caskets. 
The margins were filled with drawings — one possibly 
a likeness of the teacher. Once there was a figure in 
a skirt — straight, single lines for legs — Jack's girl — 
scrawled in evident derision of a neighbor student's 
amatory weakness. There were records of baseball 
scores. Railroads were drawn obliquely across the 
pages, bending about in order not to touch the words, 
with a rare tunnel where some word stood out too 
long. Here and there were stealthy games of tit- 
tat-toe, practiced, doubtless, behind the teacher's 
back. Everything showed boredom with the play. 
What mattered it which casket was selected! Let 
Shylock take his pound of flesh! Only let him whet 
his knife and be quick about it! All's one. It's at 
best a sad and sleepy story suited only for a winter's 
day. But now spring is here — spring that is the king 
of all the seasons. 

A bee comes buzzing on the pane. It flies off in 
careless truantry. The clock ticks slowly like a lazy 
partner in the teacher's dull conspiracy. Outside 
stretches the green world with its trees and hills 



116 



CHIMNEY-POT PAPERS 



and moving clouds. There is a river yonder with 
swimming-holes. A dog barks on a distant road. 

Presently the lad's book slips from his negligent 
fingers. He places it face down upon the desk. It 
lies disregarded like that volume of old Cowley one 
hundred years ago. His eyes wander from the black- 
board where the Merchant's dry lines are scanned and 
marked. 

r r r r r 

In sooth, I know not why I am so sad. 

And then ... his thoughts have clambered 
through the window. They have leaped across the 
schoolyard wall. Still in his ears he hears the jogging 
of the Merchant — but the sound grows dim. Like 
that other lad of long ago, his thoughts have jumped 
the hills. Already, with giddy stride, they are 
journeying to the profound region of the stars. 




On Turning Into Forty. 

THE other day, without any bells or whistles, 
I slipped off from the thirties. I felt the same 
sleepiness that morning. There was no ap- 
parent shifting of the grade. 

I am conscious, maybe, that my agility is nat what 
it was fifteen years ago. I do not leap across the 
fences. But I am not yet comic. Yonder stout man 
waddles as if he were a precious bombard. He strains 
at his forward buttons. Unless he mend his appetite, 
his shoes will be lost below his waistcoat. Already 
their tops and hulls, like battered caravels, disappear 
beneath his fat horizon. With him I bear no fellow- 
ship. But although nature has not stuffed me with 
her sweets to this thick rotundity; alas, despite of 
tubes and bottles, no shadowy garden flourishes on 
my top — waving capillary grasses and a prim path 
between the bush. Rather, I bear a general parade 
and smooth pleasance open to the ghmpses of the 
moon. 

And so at last I have turned into the forties. I 
remember now how heedlessly I had remarked a small 
brisk clock ticking upon the shelf as it counted the 
seconds — paying out to me, as it were, for my pleas- 
ure and expense, the brief coinage of my life. I had 
heard, also, unmindful of the warning, a tall and 



118 CHIMNEY-POT PAPERS 

solemn clock as I lay awake, marking regretfully the 
progress of the night. And I had been told that 
water runs always beneath the bridge, that the deepest 
roses fade, that Time's white beard keeps growing 
to his knee. These phrases of wisdom I had heard 
and others. But what mattered them to me when 
my long young life lay stretched before me ? Nor did 
the revolving stars concern me — nor the moon, spring 
with its gaudy brush, nor gray-clad winter. Nor did 
I care how the wind blew the swift seasons across the 
earth. Let Time's horses gallop, I cried. Speed! 
The bewildering peaks of youth are forward. The 
inn for the night lies far across the mountains. 

But the seconds were entered on the ledger. At 
last the gray penman has made his footing. The 
great page turns. I have passed out of the thirties. 

I am not given to brooding on my age. It is only 
by checking the years on my fingers that I am able 
to reckon the time of my birth. In the election booth, 
under a hard eye, I fumble the yearis and invite sus- 
picion. Eighteen hundred and seventy-eight, I think 
it was. But even this salient fact — this milepost on 
my eternity — I remember most quickly by the recol- 
lection of a jack-knife acquired on my tenth birthday. 
By way of celebration on that day, having selected 
the longest blade, I cut the date — 1888 — in the 
kitchen woodwork with rather a pretty flourish when 
the cook was out. The swift events that followed the 
discovery — the dear woman paddled me with a great 



ON TURNING INTO FORTY 119 

spoon through the door — fastened the occurrence in 
my memory. 

It was about the year of the jack-knife that there 
lived in our neighborhood a bad boy whose name was 
Elmer. I would have quite forgotten him except 
that I met him on the pavement a few weeks ago. He 
was the bully of our street — a towering rogue with 
red hair and one suspender. I remember a chronic 
bandage which he shifted from toe to toe. This lad 
was of larger speech than the rest of us and he could 
spit between his teeth. He used to snatch the caps 
of the younger boys and went off with our baseball 
across the fences. He was wrapped, too, in mystery, 
and it was rumored — softly from ear to ear — ^that 
once he had been arrested and taken to the station- 
house. 

And yet here he was, after all these years, not a 
bearded brigand with a knife sticking from his boot, 
but a mild undersized man, hat in hand, smiling at 
me with pleasant cordiality. His red hair had faded 
to a harmless carrot. From an overtopping rascal 
he had dwindled to my shoulder. It was as strange 
and incomprehensible as if the broken middle-aged 
gentleman, my f amilar neighbor across the street who 
nods all day upon his step, were pointed out to me as 
Captain Kidd retired. Can it be that all villains 
come at last to a slippered state ? Does Dick Turpin 
of the King's highway now falter with crutch along 
a garden path? And Captain Singleton, now that 



no CHIMNEY-POT PAPERS 

his last victim has walked the plank — does he doze 
on a sunny bench beneath his pear tree? Is no 
blood or treasure left upon the earth? Do all rascals 
lose their teeth? "Good evening, Elmer," I said, "it 
has been a long time since we have met." And I left 
him agreeable and smiling. 

No, certainly I do not brood upon my age. Except 
for a gift I forget my birthday. It is only by an 
effort that I can think of myself as running toward 
middle age. If I meet a stranger, usually, by a 
pleasant deception, I think myself the younger, and 
because of an old-fashioned deference for age I bow 
and scrape in the doorway for his passage. 

Of course I admit a suckling to be my junior. A 
few days since I happened to dine at one of the 
Purple Pups of our Greenwich Village. At my table, 
which was slashed with yellow and blue in the fashion 
of these places, sat a youth of seventeen who engaged 
me in conversation. Plainly, even to my bhndness, 
he was younger than myself. The milk was scarcely 
dry upon his mouth. He was, by his admission across 
the soup, a writer of plays and he had received al- 
ready as many as three pleasant letters of rejection. 
He flared with youth. Strange gases and opinion 
burned in his speech. His breast pocket bulged with 
manuscript, for reading at a hint. 

I was poking at my dumpling when he asked me 
if I were a socialist. No, I replied. Then perhaps 
I was an anarchist or a Bolshevist, he persisted. 



ON TURNING INTO FORTY 1^1 

N-no, I answered him, sadly and slowly, for I fore- 
saw his scorn. He leaned forward across the table. 
Begging my pardon for an intrusion in my affairs, 
he asked me if I were not aware that the world was 
slipping away from me. God knows. Perhaps. I 
had come frisking to that restaurant. I left it broken 
and decrepit. The youngster had his manuscripts 
and his anarchy. He held the wriggling world by its 
futuristic tail. It was not my world, to be sure, but 
it was a gay world and daubed with color. 

And yet, despite this humiliating encounter, I feel 
quite young. Something has passed before me that 
may be Time. The summers have come and gone. 
There is snow on the pavement where I remember 
rain. I see, if I choose, the long vista of the years, 
with diminishing figures, and tin soldiers at the start. 
Yet I doubt if I am growing older. To myself I 
seem younger than in my twenties. In the twenties 
we are quite commonly old. We bear the whole 
weight of society. The world has been waiting so 
long for us and our remedies. In the twenties we 
scorn old authority. We let Titian and Keats go 
drown themselves. We are skeptical in religion, and 
before our unrelenting iron throne immortality and 
all things of faith plead in vain. Although I can 
show still only a shabby inventory, certainly I would 
not exchange myself for that other self in the twenties. 
I have acquired in these last few years a less narrow 
sympathy and a belief that some of my colder reasons 



in CHIMNEY-POT PAPERS 

may be wrong. Nor would I barter certain knacks 
of thoughts — serious and humorous — for the renewed 
abihty to leap across a five- foot bar. I am less fearful 
of the world and its accidents. I have less embarrass- 
ment before people. I am less moody. I tack and 
veer less among my betters for some meaner profit. 
Surely I am growing younger. 

I seem to remember reading a story in which a 
scientist devised a means of reversing the direction 
of the earth. Perhaps an explosion of gases back- 
fired against the east. Perhaps he built a monstrous 
lever and contrived the moon to be his fulcrum. Any- 
way, here at last was the earth spinning backward in 
its course — the spring preceding winter — ^the sun 
rising in the west — one o'clock going before twelve — 
soup trailing after nuts — the seed-time following 
upon the harvest. And so it began to appear — so 
ran the story — that human life, too, was reversed. 
Persons came into the world as withered grandames 
and as old gentlemen with gold-headed canes, and 
then receded like crabs backward into their maturity, 
then into their adolescence and babyhood. To return 
from a protracted voyage was to find your younger 
friends sunk into pinafores. But the story was really 
too ridiculous. 

But in these last few years no doubt I do grow 
younger. The great camera of the Master rolls its 
moving pictures backward. Perhaps I am only 
thirty-eight now that the direction is reversed. 



ON TURNING INTO FORTY 



123 




I wonder what you thought, my dear X , when 

we met recently at dinner. We have not seen one 
another very often in these last few years. Our paths 
have led apart and we have not been even at shouting 
distance across the fields. It is needless to remind 
you, I hope, that I once paid you marked attention. 
It began when we were boy and girl. Our friends 



m CHIMNEY-POT PAPERS 

talked, you will recall. You were then less than a 
year younger than myself, although no doubt you 
have since lost distance. What a long time I spent 
upon my tie and collar — a stiff high collar that 
almost touched my ears! Some other turn of for- 
tune's wheel — circumstance — a shaft of moonlight 
(we were young, my dear) — a white frock — your 
acquiescence — who knows? 

I jilted you once or twice for other girls — nothing 
formal, of course — but only when you had jilted me 
three or four times. We once rowed upon a river at 
night. Did I take your hand, my dear? If I listen 
now I can hear the water dripping from the oar. 
There was darkness — and stars — and youth (your- 
self, white-armed, the symbol of its mystery). Yes, 
perhaps I am older now. 

Was it not Byron who wrote? 

I am ashes where once I was fire. 
And the soul in my bosom is dead; 
What I loved I now merely admire, 
And my heart is as gray as my head. 

I cannot pretend ever to have had so fierce a passion, 
but at least my fire still burns and with a cheery blaze. 
But you will not know this love of mine — unless, of 
course, you read this page — and even so, you can only 
suspect that I write of you, because, my dear, to be 
quite frank, I paid attention to several girls beside 
yourself. 



ON TURNING INTO FORTY 1^5 

Yes, they say that I have come to the top of the 
hill and that henceforth the view is back across my 
shoulder. I am counseled that with a turn of the 
road I had best sit with my back to the horses, for 
the mountains are behind. A little while and the 
finer purple will be showing in the west. Yet a little 
while, they say, and the bewildering peaks of youth 
will be gray and cold. 

Perhaps some of the greener pleasures are mine 
no longer. Certainly, last night I went to the Winter 
Garden, but left bored after the first act; and I had 
left sooner except for climbing across my neighbors. 
I suppose there are young popinjays who seriously 
affirm that Ziegf eld's Beauty Chorus is equal to the 
galaxy of loveliness that once pranced at Weber and 
Field's when we came down from college on Saturday 
night. At old Coster and Bial's there was once a 
marvelous beauty who swung from a trapeze above 
the audience and scandalously undressed herself down 
to the fifth encore and her stockings. And, really, 
are there plays now as exciting as the Prisoner of 
Zenda, with its great fight upon the stairs — three 
men dead and the tables overturned — Red Rudolph, 
in the end, bearing off the Princess? Heroes no 
longer wear cloak and sword and rescue noble ladies 
from castle towers. 

And Welsh rabbit, that was once a passion and the 
high symbol of extravagance, in these days has lost 
its finest flavor. In vain do we shake the paprika 



126 chimney-pot papers 

can. Pop-beer and real beer, its manly cousin, have 
neither of them the old foaming tingle when you come 
off the water. Yes, already, I am told, I am on the 
long road that leads down to the quiet inn at the 
mountain foot. I am promised, to be sure, many wide 
prospects, pleasant sounds of wind and water, and 
friendly greetings by the way. There will be a stop 
here and there for refreshments, a pause at the turn 
where the world shows best, a tightening of the brake. 
Get up, Dobbin! Go 'long! And then, tired and 
nodding, at last, we shall leave the upland and enter 
the twilight where all roads end. 

A pleasant picture, is it not — a grandfather in a 
cap — yourself, my dear sir, hugging your cold shins in 
the chimney corner? Is it not a brave end to a stir- 
ring business? Life, you say, is a journey up and 
down a hill — aspirations unattained and a mild re- 
gret, castles at dawn, a brisk wind for the noontide, 
and at night, at best, the lights of a little village, the 
stir of water on the stones, and silence. 

Is this true? Or do we not reiterate a lie? I deny 
old age. It is a false belief, a bad philosophy dim- 
ming the eyes of generations. Men and women may 
wear caps, but not because of age. In each one's 
heart, if he permit, a child keeps house to the very 
end. If Welsh rabbit lose its flavor, is it a sign of 
decaying power? I have yet to know that a relish 
for Shakespeare declines, or the love of one's friends, 
or the love of truth and beauty. Youth does not view 



ON TURNING INTO FORTY 127 

the loftiest peaks. It is at sunset that the tallest 
castles rise. 

My dear sir — you of seventy or beyond — ^if no rim 
of mountains stretches up before you, it is not your 
age that denies you but the quality of your thought. 
It has been said of old that as a man thinks so he is, 
but who of us has learned the lesson? 

The journey has neither a beginning nor an end. 
Now is eternity. Our birth is but a signpost on the 
road — our going hence, another post to mark transi- 
tion and our progress. The oldest stars are brief 
lamps upon our way. We shall travel wisely if we 
see peaks and castles all the day, and hold our child- 
hood in our hearts. Then, when at last the night has 
come, we shall plant our second post upon a windy 
height where it will be first to catch the dawn. 




On the Difference Between Wit 
and Humor. 



I AM not sure that I can draw an exact line 
between wit and humor. Perhaps the distinction 
is so subtle that only those persons can decide 
who have long white beards. But even an ignorant 
man, so long as he is clear of Bedlam, may have an 
opinion. 

I am quite positive that of the two, humor is the 
more comfortable and more livable quality. Hu- 
morous persons, if their gift is genuine and not a 
mere shine upon the surface, are always agreeable 



WIT AND HUMOR 129 

companions and they sit through the evening best. 
They have pleasant mouths turned up at the corners. 
To these corners the great Master of marionettes has 
fixed the strings and he holds them in his nimblest 
fingers to twitch them at the slightest jest. But the 
mouth of a merely witty man is hard and sour until 
the moment of its discharge. Nor is the flash from a 
witty man always comforting, whereas a humorous 
man radiates a general pleasure and is like another 
candle in the room. 

I admire wit, but I have no real liking for it. It 
has been too often employed against me, whereas 
himior is always an ally. It never points an imperti- 
nent finger into my defects. Humorous persons do 
not sit like explosives on a fuse. They are safe and 
easy comrades. But a wit's tongue is as sharp as a 
donkey driver's stick. I may gallop the faster for its 
prodding, yet the touch behind is too persuasive for 
any comfort. 

Wit is a lean creature with sharp inquiring nose, 
whereas humor has a kindly eye and comfortable 
girth. Wit, if it be necessary, uses malice to score a 
point — ^like a cat it is quick to jump — but humor 
keeps the peace in an easy chair. Wit has a better 
voice in a solo, but humor comes into the chorus best. 
Wit is as sharp as a stroke of lightning, whereas 
humor is diffuse like sunlight. Wit keeps the season's 
fashions and is precise in the phrases and judgments 
of the day, but humor is concerned with homely 



130 CHIMNEY-POT PAPERS 

eternal things. Wit wears silk, but humor in home- 
spun endures the wind. Wit sets a snare, whereas 
humor goes off whistling without a victim in its mind. 
Wit is sharper company at table, but humor serves 
better in mischance and in the rain. When it tumbles 
wit is sour, but humor goes uncomplaining without 
its dinner. Humor laughs at another's jest and holds 
its sides, while wit sits wrapped in study for a lively 
answer. But it is a workaday world in which we 
live, where we get mud upon our boots and come 
weary to the twilight — it is a world that grieves and 
suffers from many wounds in these years of war : and 
therefore as I think of my acquaintance, it is those 
who are humorous in its best and truest meaning 
rather than those who are witty who give the more 
profitable companionship. 

And then, also, there is wit that is not wit. As 
someone has written: 

Nor ever noise for wit on me could pass. 
When thro' the braying I discem'd the ass. 

I sat lately at dinner with a notoriously witty per- 
son (a really witty man) whom our hostess had 
introduced to provide the entertainment. I had read 
many of his reviews of books and plays, and while I 
confess their wit and brilliancy, I had thought them 
to be hard and intellectual and lacking in all that 
broader base of humor which aims at truth. His 
writing — catching the bad habit of the time — is too 



WIT AND HUMOR 131 

ready to proclaim a paradox and to assert the unusual, 
to throw aside in contempt the valuable haystack in 
a fine search for a paltry needle. His reviews are 
seldom right — as most of us see the right — but they 
sparkle and hold one's interest for their perversity 
and unexpected turns. 

In conversation I found him much as I had found 
him in his writing — although, strictly speaking, it was 
not a conversation, which requires an interchange of 
word and idea and is turn about. A conversation 
should not be a market where one sells and another 
buys. Rather, it should be a bargaining back and 
forth, and each person should be both merchant and 
buyer. My rubber plant for your victrola, each 
offering what he has and seeking his deficiency. It 

was my friend B who fairly put the case when 

he said that he liked so much to talk that he was 
willing to pay for his audience by listening in his turn. 

But this was a speech and a lecture. He loosed on 
us from the cold spigot of his intellect a steady flow 
of literary allusion — a practice which he professes to 
hold in scorn — and wit and epigram. He seemed 
torn from the page of Meredith. He talked like ink. 
I had believed before that only people in books could 
talk as he did, and then only when their author had 
blotted and scratched their performance for a seventh 
time before he sent it to the printer. To me it was 
an entirely new experience, for my usual acquaint- 
ances are good common honest daytime woollen folk 



1S2 CHIMNEY-POT PAPERS 

and they seldom average better than one bright thing 
in an evening. 

At first I feared that there might be a break in his 
flow of speech which I should be obliged to fill. Once, 
when there was a slight pause — a truffle was engaging 
him — I launched a frail remark; but it was swept off 
at once in the renewed torrent. And seriously it does 
not seem fair. If one speaker insists — to change the 
figure — on laying all the cobbles of a conversation, 
he should at least allow another to carry the tarpot 
and fill in the chinks. When the evening was over, 
although I recalled two or three clever stories, which 
I shall botch in the telling, I came away tired and 
dissatisfied, my tongue dry with disuse. 

Now I would not seek that kind of man as a com- 
panion with whom to be becalmed in a sailboat, and 
I would not wish to go to the country with him, least 
of all to the North Woods or any place outside of 
civilization. I am sure that he would sulk if he were 
deprived of an audience. He would be crotchety at 
breakfast across his bacon. Certainly for the woods 
a humorous man is better company, for his humor 
in mischance comforts both him and you. A hu- 
morous man — and here lies the heart of the matter — 
a humorous man has the high gift of regarding an 
annoyance in the very stroke of it as another man 
shall regard it when the annoyance is long past. If 
8i humorous person falls out of a canoe he knows the 



WIT AND HUMOR 133 

exquisite jest while his head is still bobbing in the 
cold water. A witty man, on the contrary, is sour 
until he is changed and dry : but in a week's time when 
company is about, he will make a comic story of it. 

My friend A with whom I went once into the 

Canadian woods has genuine humor, and no one can 
be a more satisfactory comrade. I do not recall that 
he said many comic things, and at bottom he was 
serious as the best humorists are. But in him there 
was a kind of joy and exaltation that lasted through- 
out the day. If the duffle were piled too high and fell 
about his ears, if the dinner was burned or the tent 
blew down in a driving storm at night, he met these 
mishaps as though they were the very things he had 
come north to get, as though without them the trip 
would have lacked its spice. This is an easy phi- 
losophy in retrospect but hard when the wet canvas 

falls across you and the rain beats in. A laughed 

at the very moment of disaster as another man will 
laugh later in an easy chair. I see him now swinging 
his axe for firewood to dry ourselves when we were 
spilled in a rapids ; and again, while pitching our tent 
on a sandy beach when another storm had drowned 
us. And there is a certain cry of his (dully. Wow! 
on paper) expressive to the initiated of all things 
gay, which could never issue from the mouth of a 
merely witty man. 

Real humor is primarily human — or divine, to be 



ISJi, CHIMNEY-POT PAPERS 

exact — and after that the fun may follow naturally 
in its order. Not long ago I saw Louis Jouvet of 
the French Company play Sir Andrew Ague- Cheek. 
It was a most humorous performance of the part, and 
the reason is that the actor made no primary effort 
to be funny. It was the humanity of his playing, 
making his audience love him first of all, that pro- 
voked the comedy. His long thin legs were comical 
and so was his drawling talk, but the very heart and 
essence was this love he started in his audience. Poor 
fellow! how delightfully he smoothed the feathers in 
his hat! How he feared to fight the duel! It was 
easy to love such a dear silly human fellow. A merely 
witty player might have drawn as many laughs, but 
there would not have been the catching at the heart. 
As for books and the wit or humor of their pages, 
it appears that wit fades, whereas humor lasts. 
Humor uses permanent nutgalls. But is there any- 
thing more melancholy than the wit of another 
generation? In the first place, this wit is intertwined 
with forgotten circumstance. It hangs on a fashion — 
on the style of a coat. It arose from a forgotten bit 
of gossip. In the play of words the sources of the 
pun are lost. It is like a local jest in a narrow coterie, 
barren to an outsider. Sydney Smith was the most 
celebrated wit of his day, but he is dull reading now. 
Blackwood's at its first issue was a witty daring sheet, 
but for us the pages are stagnant. I suppose that no 
one now laughs at the witticisms of Thomas Hood. 



WIT AND HUMOR 135 

Where are the wits of yesteryear? Yet the humor of 
Falstaff and Lamb and Fielding remains and is a 
reminder to us that humor, to be real, must be founded 
on humanity and on truth. 




On Going to a Party. 

ALTHOUGH I usually enjoy a party when 
I have arrived, I seldom anticipate it with 
pleasure. I remain sour until I have hung 
my hat. I suspect that my disorder is general and 
that if any group of formal diners could be caught 
in preparation midway between their tub and over- 
shoes, they would be found a peevish company who 
might be expected to snap at one another. Yet look 
now at their smiling faces! With what zest they 
crunch their food! How cheerfully they clatter on 
their plates ! Who would suspect that yonder smiling 
fellow who strokes his silky chin was sullen when he 
fixed his tie; or that this pleasant babble comes out 
of mouths that lately sulked before their mirrors? 
I am not sure from what cause my own crustiness 



ON GOING TO A PARTY 137 

proceeds. I am of no essential unsociability. Nor 
is it wholly the masquerade of unaccustomed clothes. 
I am deft with a bow-knot and patient with my 
collar. It may be partly a perversity of sex, inas- 
much as we men are sometimes "taken" by our women 
folk. But chiefly it comes from an unwillingness to 
pledge the future, lest on the very night my own 
hearth appear the better choice. Here we are, with 
legs stretched for comfort toward the fire — easy and 
unbuttoned. Let the rain beat on the glass! Let 
chimneys topple! Let the wind whistle to its shrill 
companions of the North! But although I am led 
growling and reluctant to my host's door — with 
stiffened paws, as it were, against the sill — I usually 
enjoy myself when I am once inside. To see me 
across the salad smiling at my pretty neighbor, no 
one would know how churlish I had been on the 
coming of the invitation. 

I have attended my share of formal dinners. I 

have dined with the magnificent H s and their 

Roman Senator has announced me at the door; al- 
though, when he asked my name in the hall, I thought 
at first in my ignorance that he gave me directions 
about my rubbers. No one has faced more forks and 
knives, or has apportioned his implements with nicer 
discrimination among the meats. Not once have I 
been forced to stir my after-dinner coffee with a soup 
spoon. And yet I look back on these grand occasions 
with contentment chiefly because they are past. I 



138 CHIMNEY-POT PAPERS 

am in whole agreement with Cleopatra when she 
spoke slightingly of her salad days — surely a fashion- 
able afternoon affair at a castle on the river Nile — 
when, as she confessed, she was young and green in 
judgment. 

It is usually a pleasure to meet distinguished per- 
sons who, as a rule, are friendly folk who sit in peace 
and comfort. But if they are lugged in and set up 
stiffly at a formal dinner they are too much an 
exhibition. In this circumstance they cannot be 
natural and at their best. And then I wonder how 
they endure our abject deference and flabby sur- 
render to their opinions. Would it not destroy all 
interest in a game of bowling if the wretched pins 
fell down before the hit were made? It was lately 
at a dinner that our hostess held in captivity three of 
these celebrated lions. One of them was a famous 
traveler who had taken a tiger by its bristling beard. 
The second was a popular lecturer. The third was 
in distemper and crouched quietly at her plate. The 
first two were sharp and bright and they roared to 
expectation. But I do not complain when lions take 
possession of the cage, for it reduces the general 
liability of talk, and a common man, if he be indus- 
trious, may pluck his bird down to the bone in peace. 

A formal reception is even worse than a dinner. 
One stands around with stalled machinery. Good 
stout legs, that can go at a trot all day, become now 
weak and wabbly. One hurdles dispiritedly over 



ON GOING TO A PARTY 139 

trailing skirts. One tries in conversation to think of 
the name of a play he has just seen, but it escapes 
him. It is, however, so nearly in his grasp, that it 
prevents him from turning to another topic. Benson, 
the essayist, also disliked formal receptions and he 
quotes Prince Hal in their dispraise. "Prithee, Ned," 
says the Prince — and I fancy that he has just led a 
thirsty Duchess to the punchbowl, and was now in 
the very act of escaping while her face was buried in 
the cup — "Prithee, Ned," he says, "come out of this 
fat room, and lend me thy hand to laugh a little!" 
And we can imagine these two enfranchised rogues, 
easy at heart, making off later to their Eastcheap 
tavern, and the passing of a friendly cup. But now, 
alas, today, all of the rooms of the house are fat and 
thick with people. There is a confusion of tongues 
as when work on the tower of Babel was broken off. 
There is no escape. If it were one's good luck to be 
a waiter, one could at least console himself that it was 
his livelihood. 

The furniture has been removed from all the rooms 
in order that more persons may be more uncomfort- 
able. Or perhaps the chairs and tables, like rats in a 
leaky ship, have scuttled off, as it were, now that 
fashion has wrecked the home. A friend of mine, 

J , resents these entertainments. No sooner, 

recently, did he come into such a bare apartment 
where, in happier days his favorite chair had stood, 
than he hinted to the guests that the furniture had 



no CHIMNEY-POT PAPERS 

been sold to meet the expenses of the day. This sorry- 
jest lasted him until, on whispering to a servant, he 
learned that the chairs had been stored in an upper 
hall. At this he proposed that the party reassemble 
above, where at least they might sit down and be 

comfortable. When I last saw J that evening he 

was sitting at the turn of the stairs behind an exotic 
shrubbery, where he had found a vagrant chair that 
had straggled behind the upper emigration. 

The very envelope that contains a formal invitation 
bears a forbidding look. It is massive and costly to 
the eye. It is much larger than a letter, unless, per- 
haps, one carries on a correspondence with a giant 
from Brobdingnag. You turn it round and round 
with sad premonition. The very writing is coldly im- 
personal without the pinch of a more human hand. It 
practices a chill anonymity as if it contains a warrant 
for a hanging. At first you hope it may be merely 
an announcement from your tailor, inasmuch as com- 
merce patterns its advertisements on these social 
forms. I am told that there was once a famous 
man — a distinguished novelist — ^who so disliked for- 
mal parties but was so timid at their rejection that 
he took refuge in the cellar whenever one of these 
forbidding documents arrived, until he could forge a 
plausible excuse ; for he believed that these colder and 
more barren rooms quickened his invention. The 
story goes that once when he was in an unusually 
timid state he lacked the courage to break the seal and 



ON GOING TO A PARTY HI 

so spent an uneasy morning upon the tubs, to the 
inconvenience of the laundress who thought that he 
fretted upon the plot. At last, on tearing off the 
envelope, he found to his relief that it was only a 
notice for a display of haberdashery at a fashionable 
shop. In his gratitude at his escape he at once sought 
his desk and conferred a blushing heiress on his hero. 

But perhaps there are persons of an opposite mind 
who welcome an invitation. Even the preliminary 
rummage delights them when their clothes are sent 
for pressing and their choice wavers among their 
plumage. For such persons the superscription on 
the envelope now seems written in the spacious hand 
of hospitality. 

But of informal dinners and the meeting of friends 
we can all approve without reserve. I recall, once 
upon a time, four old gentlemen who met every week 
for whist. Three of them were of marked eccen- 
tricity. One of them, when the game was at its pitch, 
reached down to the rungs of his chair and hitched it 
first to one side and then to the other, mussing up the 
rugs. The second had the infirmity of nodding his 
head continuously. Even if he played a trivial three 
spot, he sat on the decision and wagged his beard up 
and down like a judge. The third sucked his teeth 
and thereby made hissing noises. Later in the even- 
ing there would be served buttermilk or cider, and 
the sober party would adjourn at the gate. But 
there were two young rascals who practiced these 



H2 CHIMNEY-POT PAPERS 

eccentricities and after they had gone to bed, for the 
exquisite humor of it, they nodded their heads, too, 
and sucked their teeth with loud hissing noises. 

No one entertains more pleasantly than the S 

family and no one is more informal. If you come on 
the minute for your dinner, it is likely that none of 

the family is about. After a search J is found 

in a flannel shirt in his garden with a watering-can. 
"Hello!" he says in surprise. "What time is it? 
Have you come already for dinner?" 

"For God's sake," you reply — for I assume you 
to be of familiar and profane manners — "get up and 
wash yourself! Don't you know that you are giving 
a party?" 

J affects to be indignant. "Who is giving this 

party, anyway?" he asks. "If it's yours, you run it!" 
And then he leads you to the house, where you abuse 
each other agreeably as he dresses. 

Once a year on Christmas Eve they give a general 
party. This has been a custom for a number of years 
and it is now an institution as fixed as the night itself. 
Invitations are not issued. At most a rumor goes 
abroad to the elect that nine o'clock is a proper time 
to come, when the children, who have peeked for 
Santa Claus up the chimney, have at last been put to 
bed. There is a great wood fire in the sitting-room 
and, by way of andirons, two soldiers of the Continen- 
tal Army keep up their endless march across the 
hearth. The fireplace is encircled by a line of leather 



ON GOING TO A PARTY US 

cushions that rest upon the floor, like a window-seat 
that has undergone amputation of all its legs. 

But the center of the entertainment is a prodigious 
egg-nog that rises from the dining table. I do not 
know the composition of the drink, yet my nose is 
much at fault if it includes aught but eggs and 

whiskey. At the end of the table J stands with 

his mighty ladle. It is his jest each year — for always 
there is a fresh stranger who has not heard it — it is 
his jest that the drink would be fair and agreeable 
to the taste if it were not for the superfluity of eggs 
which dull the mixture. 

No one, even of a sour prohibition, refuses his 
entreaty. My aunt, who speaks against the Demon, 
once appeared at the party. She came sniffing to the 
table. "Ought I to take it, John?" she asked. 

"Mildest thing you ever drank," said John, and 
he ladled her out a cup. 

My aunt smelled it suspiciously. 

"It's eggs," said John. 

"Eggs?" said my aunt, "What a funny smell they 
have!" She said this with a facial expression not un- 
like that of Little Red Ridinghood, when she first saw 
the old lady with the long nose and sharp eyes. 

"Nothing bad, I hope," said John. 

"N-no," said my aunt slowly, and she took a sip. 

"Of course the eggs spoil it a little," said John. 

"It's very good," said my aunt, as she took another 
sip. 



lU CHIMNEY-POT PAPERS 

Then she put down her glass, but only when it was 
empty. "John," she said, "you are a rogue. You 
would like to get me tipsy." And at this she moved 
out of danger. Little Red Ridinghood escaped the 
wolf as narrowly. But did Little Red Ridinghood 
escape? Dear me, how one forgets! 

But in closing I must not fail to mention an old 
lady and gentleman, both beyond eighty, who have 
always attended these parties. They have met old 
age with such trust and cheerfulness, and they are so 
eager at a jest, that no one of all the gathering fits 
the occasion half so well. And to exchange a word 
with them is to feel a pleasant contact with all the 
gentleness and mirth that have lodged with them 
during the space of their eighty years. The old 
gentleman is an astronomer and until lately, when he 
moved to a newer quarter of the town, he had behind 
his house in a proper tower a telescope, through which 
he showed his friends the moon. But in these last 
few years his work has been entirely mathematical 
and his telescope has fallen into disorder. His work 
finds a quicker conmient among scientists of foreign 
lands than on his own street. 

It is likely that tonight he has been busy with the 
computation of the orbit of a distant star up to the 
very minute when his wife brought in his tie and 
collar. And then arm and arm they have set out for 
the party, where they will sit until the last guest has 
gone. 



ON GOING TO A PARTY H5 

Alas, when the party comes this Christmas, only 
one of these old people will be present, for the other 
with a smile lately fell asleep. 




On a Pair of Leather Suspenders. 

NOT long since I paid a visit to New Haven 
before daylight of a winter morning. I had 
hoped that my sleeper from Washington 
might be late and I was encouraged in this by the 
trainman who said that the dear old thing commonly 
went through New Haven at breakfast time. But 
it was barely three o'clock when the porter plucked 
at me in my upper berth. He intruded, happily, on 
a dream in which the train came rocking across the 
comforter. 

Three o'clock, if you approach it properly through 
the evening, is said to have its compensations. There 
are persons (with a hiccough) who pronounce it the 
shank of the evening, but as an hour of morning it 
has few apologists. It is the early bird that catches 
the worm; but this should merely set one thinking 



ON A PAIR OF LEATHER SUSPENDERS 11^7 

before he thrusts out a foot into the cold morning, 
whether he may justly consider himself a bird or a 
worm. If no glad twitter rises to his lips in these 
early hours, he had best stay unpecked inside his 
coverlet. 

It is hard to realize that other two-legged creatures 
like myself are habitually awake at this hour. In a 
wakeful night I may have heard the whistles and the 
clank of far-off wheels, and I may have known dimly 
that work goes on; yet for the most part I have 
fancied that the world, like a river steamboat in a 
fog, is tied at night to its shore: or if it must go 
plunging on through space to keep a schedule, that 
here and there a light merely is set upon a tower to 
warn the planets. 

A locomotive was straining at its buttons, and from 
the cab a smoky engineer looked down on me. A 
truck load of boxes rattled down the platform. 
Crates of affable familiar hens were off upon a 
journey, bragging of their families. Men with flar- 
ing tapers tapped at wheels. The waiting-room, too, 
kept, as it were, one eye open to the night. The 
coffee-urn steamed on the lunch counter, and sand- 
wiches sat inside their glass domes and looked darkly 
on the world. 

It was the hour when "the tired burglar seeks his 
bed." I had thought of dozing in a hotel chair until 
breakfast, but presently a flood appeared in the 



H8 CHIMNEY-POT PAPERS 

persons of three scrub women. The fountains of the 
great deep were opened and the waters prevailed. 

It still lacked an hour or so of daylight. I remem- 
bered that there used to be a humble restaurant and 
kitchen on wheels — to the vulgar, a dog-wagon — ^up 
toward York Street. This wagon, once upon a time, 
had appeased our appetites when we had been late 
for chapel and Commons. As an institution it was 
so trite that once we made of it a fraternity play. I 
faintly remember a pledge to secrecy — sworn by the 
moon and the seven wandering stars — ^but neverthe- 
less I shall divulge the plot. It was a burlesque 
tragedy in rhyme. Some eighteen years ago, it seems, 
Brabantio, the noble Venetian Senator, kept this 
same dog-wagon — ^he and his beautiful daughter 
Desdemona. Here came Othello, lago and Cassio of 
the famous class of imipty-ump. 

The scene of the drama opens with Brabantio 
flopping his dainties on the iron, chanting to himself 
a lyric in praise of their tender juices. Presently 
Othello enters and when Brabantio's back is turned 
he makes love to Desdemona — a handsome fellow, 
this Othello, with the manner of a hero and curled 
moustachios. Exit Othello to a nine o'clock, Ladd 
on Confusions. Now the rascal lago enters — myself ! 
with flowing tie. He hates Othello. He glowers 
like a villain and soliloquizes : 

In order that my vengeance I may plot 
Give me a dog, and give it to me hot ! 



ON A PAIR OF LEATHER SUSPENDERS 1J,J9 

That was the kind of play. Finally, Desdemona is 
nearly smothered but is returned at last to Othello's 
arms. lago meets his deserts. He is condemned to 
join A K E, a rival fraternity. But the warm 
heart of Desdemona melts and she intercedes to save 
him from this horrid end. In mercy — behind the 
scenes — ^his head is chopped off. Then all of us, 
heroines and villains, sat to a late hour around the 
fire and told one another how the real stage thirsted 
for us. We drank lemonade mostly but we sang of 
beer — one song about 

Beer, beer, glorious beer! 

Fill yourself right up to here! 

accompanied with a gesture several inches above the 
head. As the verses progressed it was customary to 
stand on chairs and to reach up on tiptoe to show the 
increasing depth. 

But the dog-wagon has now become a gilded un- 
familiar thing, twice its former size and with stools 
for a considerable company. I questioned the pro- 
prietor whether he might be descended from the noble 
Brabantio, but the dull fellow gave no response. The 
wagon has passed to meaner ownership. 

Across the street Vanderbilt Hall loomed indis- 
tinctly. To the ignorant it may be necessary to 
explain that its courtyard is open to Chapel Street, 
but that an iron grill stretches from wing to wing and 
keeps out the town. This grill is high enough for 



150 CHIMNEY-POT PAPERS 

Hagenbeck, and it used to be a favorite game with 
us to play animal behind it for the street's amuse- 
ment. At the hour when the crowd issued from the 
matinee at the Hyperion Theatre, our wittiest stu- 
dents paced on all fours up and down behind this 

grill and roared for raw beef. E was the wag of 

the building and he could climb up to a high place and 
scratch himself like a monkey — an entertainment of 
more humor than elegance. Elated with success, he 
and a companion later chartered a street-organ — a 
doleful one-legged affair — and as man and monkej^^ 
they gathered pennies out Orange Street. 

I turned into the dark Campus by Osborn Hall. 
It is as ugly a building as one could meet on a week's 
journey, and yet by an infelicity all class pictures 
are taken on its steps. Freshman courses are given 
in the basement — a French class once in particular. 
Sometimes, when we were sunk dismally in the ir- 
regular verbs, bootblacks and old-clothes men stopped 
on the street and grinned down on us. And all the 
dreary hour, as we sweated with translation, above 
us on the pavement the feet and happy legs of the 
enfranchised went by the window. 

Yale is a bad jumble of architecture. It is amazing 
how such incongruous buildings can lodge together. 
Did not the Old Brick Row cry out when Durfee was 
built? Surely the Gothic library uttered a protest 
against its newer adjunct. And are the Bicentennial 
buildings so beautiful? At best we have exchanged 



ON A PAIR OF LEATHER SUSPENDERS 151 

the fraudulent wooden ramparts of Alumni Hall for 
the equally fraudulent inside columns of these newer 
buildings. It is a mercy that there is no style and 
changing fashion in elm trees. As Viola might have 
remarked about the Campus: it were excellently 
done, if God did all. 

Presently in the dark I came on the excavations 
for the Harkness quadrangle. So at last Commons 
was gone. In that old building we ate during our 
impoverished weeks. I do not know that we saved 
much, for we were driven to extras, but the reckoning 
was deferred. There was a certain tutti-frutti ice- 
cream, rich in ginger, that has now vanished from the 
earth. Or chocolate eclairs made the night stand out. 
I recall that one could seldom procure a second help- 
ing of griddlecakes except on those mornings when 
there were ants in the syrup. Also, I recall that 
sometimes there was a great crash of trays at the 
pantry doors, and almost at the instant two old 
Goodies, harnessed ready with mops and pails, ran 
out and sponged up the wreckage. 

And Pierson Hall is gone, that was once the center 
of Freshman life. Does anybody remember The 
Voice? It was a weekly paper issued in the interest 
of prohibition. I doubt if we would have quarreled 
with it for this, but it denounced Yale and held up 
in contrast the purity of Oberlin. Oberlin! And 
therefore we hated it, and once a week we burned its 
issue in the stone and plaster corridors of Pierson. 



15^ CHIMNEY-POT PAPERS 

There was once a residence at the corner of York 
and Library where Freshmen resided. The railing 
of the stairs wabbled. The bookcase door lacked a 
hinge. Three out of four chairs were rickety. The 
bath-tub, which had been the chemical laboratory for 
some former student, was stained an unhealthy color. 
If ever it shall appear that Harlequin lodged upon 
the street, here was the very tub where he washed his 
clothes. Without caution the window of the bed- 
room fell out into the back yard. But to atone for 
these defects, up through the scuttle in the hall there 
was an airy perch upon the roof. Here Freshmen 
might smoke their pipes in safety — a privilege denied 
them on the street — and debate upon their affairs. 
Who were hold-oif men! Who would make BovXry! 
Or they invented outrageous names for the faculty. 
My dear Professor Blank, could you hear yourself 
described by these young cubs through their tobacco 
smoke, your learned ears, so alert for dactyl and 
spondee, would grow red. 

Do Scott's boys, I wonder, still gather clothes for 
pressing around the Campus? Do they still sell 
tickets — sixteen punches for a dollar — five punches 
to the suit? On Monday mornings do colored 
laundresses push worn baby-carts around to gather 
what we were pleased to call the "dirty filth"? And 
do these same laundresses push back these selfsame 
carts later in the week with "clean filth" aboard? Are 
stockings mended in the same old way, so that the 



ON A PAIR OF LEATHER SUSPENDERS 153 

toes look through the open mesh? Have college 
sweeps learned yet to tuck in the sheets at the foot? 
Do old-clothes men — Fish-eye? Do you remember 
him? — do old-clothes men still whine at the corner, 
and look you up and down in cheap appraisal? Pop 
Smith is dead, who sold his photograph to Freshmen, 
but has he no successor? How about the old fellow 
who sold hot chestnuts at football games — "a nickel 
a bush" — a rare contraction meant to denote a 
bushel — in reality fifteen nuts and fifteen worms. 
Does George Felsburg still play the overture at 
Poll's, reading his newspaper the while, and do comic 
actors still jest with him across the footlights? 

Is it still ethical to kick Freshmen on the night of 
Omega Lambda Chi? Is "nigger baby" played on 
the Campus any more? The loser of this precious 
game, in the golden days, leaned forward against the 
wall with his coat-tails raised, while everybody took 
a try at him with a tennis ball. And, of course, no one 
now plays "piel." A youngster will hardly have 
heard of the game. It was once so popular that all 
the stone steps about the college showed its marks. 
And next year we heard that the game had spread to 
Harvard. 

Do students still make for themselves oriental 
corners with Bagdad stripes and Turkish lamps? 
Do the fair fingers of Farmington and Northampton 
still weave the words " 'Xeath the Elms" upon sofa 
pillows? Do Seniors still bow the President down the 



15i CHIMNEY-POT PAPERS 

aisle of Chapel ? Do students still get out their Greek 
with "trots"? It was the custom for three or four 
lazy students to gather together and summon up a 
newsy to read the trot, while they, lolling with pipes 
on their Morris chairs, fumbled with the text and in- 
terlined it against a loss of memory. Let the fair- 
haired goddess Juno speak! Ulysses, as he pleases, 
may walk on the shore of the loud-sounding sea. 
Thereafter in class one may repose safely on his inter- 
lineation and snap at flies with a rubber band. This 
method of getting a lesson was all very well except 
that the newsy halted at the proper name. A device 
was therefore hit on of calling all the gods and heroes 
by the name of Smith. Homeric combat then ran 
like this : the heart of Smit was black with anger and 
he smote Smit upon the brazen helmet. And the 
world grew dark before his eyes, and he fell forward 
like a tower and bit the dust and his armor clanked 
about him. But at evening, from a far-off mountain 
top the white-armed goddess Smit-Smit (Pallas- 
Athena) saw him, and she felt compash — compassion 
for him. 

And I suppose that students still sing upon the 
fence. There was a Freshman once, in those early 
nights of autumn when they were still a prey to 
Sophomores, who came down Library Street after 
his supper at Commons. He wondered whether the 
nights of hazing were done and was unresolved 
whether he ought to return to his room and sit close. 



ON A PAIR OF LEATHER SUSPENDERS 155 

Presently he heard the sound of singing. It came 
from the Campus, from the fence. He was greener 
than most Freshmen and he had never heard men 
sing in four-part harmony. With him music had 
always been a single tune, or at most a lost tenor 
fumbled uncertainly for the pitch. Any grunt had 
been a bass. And so the sound ravished him. In the 
open air and in the dark the harmony was unpar- 
alleled. He stole forward, still with one eye open for 
Sophomores, and crouched in the shadowy angle of 
North Middle. Now the song was in full chorus and 
the branches of the elms swayed to it, and again a 
bass voice sang alone and the others hummed a low 
accompaniment. 

Occasionally, across the Campus, someone in pass- 
ing called up to a window, "Oh, Weary Walker, stick 
out your head!" And then, after a pause, satirically, 
when the head was out, "Stick it in again!" On the 
stones there were the sounds of feet — feet with lazy 
purpose — loud feet down wooden steps, bound for 
pleasure. At the windows there were lights, where 
dull thumbs moved down across a page. Let A equal 
B to find our Z. And let it be quick about it, before 
the student nod! And to the Freshman, crouching 
in the shadow, it seemed at last that he was a part of 
this life, with its music, its voices, its silent elms, the 
dim buildings with their lights, the laughter and the 
glad feet sounding in the dark. 



156 CHIMNEY-POT PAPERS 

I came now, rambling on this black wintry morn- 
ing, before the sinister walls of Skull and Bones. 

I sat on a fence and contemplated the building. 
It is as dingy as ever and, doubtless, to an under- 
graduate, as fearful as ever. What rites and cere- 
monies are held within these dim walls ! What awful 
celebrations! The very stones are grim. The chain 
outside that swings from post to post is not as other 
chains, but was forged at midnight. The great door 
has a black spell upon it. It was on such a door, iron- 
bound and pitiless, that the tragic Ygraine beat in 
vain for mercy. 

It is a breach of etiquette for an undergraduate 
in passing even to turn and look at Bones. Its name 
may not be mentioned to a member of the society, 
and one must look furtively around before pronounc- 
ing it. Now as I write the word, I feel a last vibration 
of the fearful tremor. 

Seniors compose its membership — fifteen or so, and 
membership is ranked as the highest honor of the 
college. But in God's name, what is all this pother? 
Are there not already enough jealousies without this 
one added? Does not college society already fall 
into enough locked coteries without this one? Xo 
matter how keen is the pride of membership, it does 
not atone for the disappointments and the heart- 
burnings of failure. It is hinted obscurely for expia- 
tion that it and its fellow societies do somehow confer 
a benefit on the college by holding out a reward for 



ON A PAIR OF LEATHER SUSPENDERS 157 

hard endeavor. This is the highest goal. I distrust 
the wisdom of the judges. There is an honester 
repute to be gained in the general estimate of one's 
fellows. These societies cut an unnatural cleavage 
across the college. They are the source of dishonest 
envy and of mean lick-spittling. For three years, 
until the election is announced, there is much playing 
for position. A favored fellow, whose election is 
certain, is courted by others who stand on a slippery 
edge, because it is known that in Senior elections one 
is rated by his association. And is it not prepos- 
terous that fifteen youngsters should set themselves 
above the crowd, wear obscure jewelry and wrap 
themselves in an empty and pretentious mystery? 

But what has this rambling paper to do with a pair 
of leather suspenders? Nothing. Nothing much. 
Only, after a while, just before the dawn, I came in 
front of the windows of a cheap haberdasher. And 
I recalled how I had once bought at this very shop 
a pair of leather suspenders. They were the only 
ones left — ^it was hinted that Seniors bought them 
largely — and they were a bargain. The proprietor 
blew off the dust and slapped them and dwelt upon 
their merits. They would last me into middle age 
and were cheap. There was, I recall, a kind of tricky 
differential between the shoulders to take up the slack 
on either side. Being a Freshman I was prevailed 
upon, and I bought them and walked to Morris Cove 
while they creaked and fretted. And here was the 



158 CHIMNEY-POT PAPERS 

very shop, arising in front of me as from times before 
the flood. With it there arose, too, a recollection of 
my greenness and timidity. And mingled with all 
the hours of happiness of those times there were 
hours, also, of emptiness and loneliness — hours when, 
newcome to my surroundings, for fear of rebuff I 
walked alone. 

The night still lingers. These dark lines of wall 
and tree and tower are etched by Time with memories 
to burn the pattern. The darkness stirs strangely, 
like waters in the solemn bowl when a witch reads off 
the future. But the past is in this darkness, and the 
December wind this night has roused up the summer 
winds of long ago. In that cleft is the old window. 
Here are the stairs, wood and echoing with an almost 
forgotten tread, A word, a phrase, a face, shows for 
an instant in the shadows. Here, too, in memory, is 
a pageantry of old custom with its songs and uproar, 
victory with its fires and dance. 

Forms, too, I see bent upon their books, eager or 
dull, with intent or sleepy finger on the page. And 
I hear friendly cries and the sound of many feet 
across the night. 

Dawn at last — a faint light through the elms. 
From the Chapel tower the bells sound the hour and 
strike their familiar melody. Dawn. And now the 
East in triumphal garment scatters my memories, 
born of night, before its flying wheel. 




Boots for Runaways, 



NOT long ago, having come through upon the 
uppers of my shoes, I wrapped the pair in a 
bit of newspaper and went around the corner 
into Sixth Avenue to find a cobbler. This is not 
difficult, for there are at least three cobblers to the 
block, all of them in basements four or five steps below 
the sidewalk. Cobblers and little tailors who press 
and repair clothing, small grocers and delicatessen 
venders — these are the chief commerce of the street. 
I passed my tailor's shop, which is next to the corner. 
He is a Russian Jew who came to this country before 
the great war. Every Thursday, when he takes away 
my off suit, I ask him about the progress of the Revo- 
lution. At first I found him hopeful, yet in these 
last few months his opinions are a little broken. His 



160 CHIMNEY-POT PAPERS 

shop consists of a single room, with a stove to heat 
his irons and a rack for clothes. It is so open to the 
street that once when it was necessary for me to 
change trousers he stood between me and the window 
with one foot against the door by way of moratorium 
on his business. His taste in buttons is loud. Those 
on my dinner coat are his choice — great round jewels 
that glisten in the dark. 

Next to my tailor, except for a Chinese laundry 
with a damp celestial smell, is a delicatessen shop with 
a pleasant sound of French across the counter. Here 
are sausages, cut across the middle in order that no 
one may buy the pig, as it were, in its poke. Potato 
salad is set out each afternoon in a great bowl with 
a wooden spoon sticking from its top. Then there is 
a baked bean, all brown upon the crust, which is 
housed with its fellows in a cracked baking dish and 
is not to be despised. There is also a tray of pastry 
with whipped cream oozing agreeably from the joints, 
and a pickle vat as corrective to these sweets. But 
behind the shop is the bakery and I can watch a whole- 
some fellow, with his sleeves tucked up, rolling pasties 
thin on a great white table, folding in nuts and jellies 
and cutting them deftly for the oven. 

Across the street there resides a mender of musical 
instruments. He keeps dusty company with violins 
and basses that have come to broken health. When 
a trombone slips into disorder, it seeks his sanitarium. 
Occasionally, as I pass, I catch the sound of a twang- 



BOOTS FOR RUNAWAYS 161 

ing string, as if at last a violin were convalescent. 
Or I hear a reedy nasal upper note, and I know that 
an oboe has been mended of its complaint and that 
in these dark days of winter it yearns for a woodside 
stream and the return of spring. It seems rather a 
romantic business tinkering these broken instruments 
into harmony. 

Next door there is a small stationer — a bald-headed 
sort of business, as someone has called it. Ruled 
paper for slavish persons, plain sheets for bold 
Bolshevists. 

Then comes our grocer. There is no heat in the 
place except what comes from an oil stove on which 
sits a pan of steaming water. Behind the stove with 
his twitching ear close against it a cat lies at all hours 
of the day. There is an engaging smudge across his 
nose, as if he had been led off on high adventure to 
the dusty corners behind the apple barrel. I bend 
across the onion crate to pet him, and he stretches his 
paws in and out rhythmically in complete content- 
ment. He walks along the counter with arched back 
and leans against our purchases. 

Next our grocer is our bootblack, who has set up 
a sturdy but shabby throne to catch the business oif 
the "L." How majestically one sits aloft here with 
outstretched toe, for all the world like the Pope 
offering his saintly toe for a sinner's kiss. The robe 
pontifical, the triple crown! Or, rather, is this not 
a secular throne, seized once in a people's rising? 



162 CHIMNEY-POT PAPERS 

Here is a use for whatever thrones are discarded by 
this present war. Where the crowd is thickest at 
quitting time — perhaps where the subway brawls 
below Fourteenth Street — there I would set the 
German Kaiser's seat for the least of us to clamber on. 

I took my shoes out of their wrapper. The cobbler 
is old and wrinkled and so bent that one might think 
that Nature aimed to contrive a hoop of him but had 
botched the full performance. He scratched my 
name upon the soles and tossed them into the pile. 
There were big and little shoes, some with low square 
heels and others with high thin heels as if their wear- 
ers stood tiptoe with curiosity. It is a quality, they 
say, that marks the sex. On the bench were bits of 
leather, hammers, paring-knives, awls, utensils of 
every sort. 

On arriving home I found an old friend awaiting 

me. B has been engaged in a profitable business 

for fifteen years or so and he has amassed a consider- 
able fortune. Certainly he deserves, it, for he has been 
at it night and day and has sacrificed many things to 
it. He has kept the straight road despite all truant 
beckoning. But his too close application has cramped 
his soul. His organization and his profits, his balance 
sheets and output have seemed to become the whole 
of him. 

But for once I found that B was in no hurry 

and we talked more intimately than in several years. 
I discovered soon that his hard busyness was no more 



BOOTS FOR RUNAWAYS 163 

than a veneer and that his freer self still lived, but 
in confinement. At least he felt the great lack in his 
life, which had been given too much to the piling up 
of things, to the sustaining of position — getting and 
spending. Yet he could see no end. He was caught 
in the rich man's treadmill, only less horrible than 
that of the poor man with its cold and hunger. 

Afterwards, when he had gone, I fell into a survey 
of certain other men of my acquaintance. Some few 
of them are rich also, and they heap up for themselves 
a pile of material things until they stifle in the midst. 
They run swiftly and bitterly from one appointment 
to another in order that they may add a motor to 
their stable. If they lie awake at night, they plan 
a new confusion for the morrow. They are getting 
and spending always. They have been told many 
times that some day they will die and leave their 
wealth, yet they labor ceaselessly to increase their 
pile. It is as if one should sweat and groan to load 
a cart, knowing that soon it goes off on another road. 
And yet not one of these persons will conceive that 
I mean him. He will say that necessity keeps him at 
it. Or he will cite his avocations to prove he is not 
included. But he plays golf fretfully with his e^^e 
always on the score. He drives his motor furiously 
to hold a schedule. Yet in his youth many of these 
prosperous fellows learned to play upon a fiddle, and 
they dreamed on college window-seats. They had 



16Jf CHIMNEY-POT PAPERS 

time for friendliness before they became so busy hold- 
ing this great world by its squirming tail. 

Or perhaps they are not so very wealthy. If so, 
they work the harder. To support their wives and 
children? By no means. To support the pretense 
that they are really wealthy, to support a neighbor's 
competition. It is this competition of house and 
goods that keeps their noses on the stone. Expendi- 
ture always runs close upon their income, and their 
days are a race to keep ahead. 

I was thinking rather mournfully of the hard and 
unnecessary condition of these persons, when I fell 
asleep. And by chance, these unlucky persons, my 
boots and my cobbler, even the oboe mender, all of 
them somehow got mixed in my dream. 

It seems that there was a cobbler once, long ago, 
who kept a shop quite out of the common run and 
marvelous in its way. It stood in a shadowy city over 
whose dark streets the buildings toppled, until spiders 
spun their webs across from roof to roof. And to 
this cobbler the god Mercury himself journeyed to 
have wings sewed to his flying shoes. High patron- 
age. And Atalanta, too, came and held out her swift 
foot for the fitting of a running sandal. But perhaps 
the cobbler's most famous customer was a well-known 
giant who ordered of him his seven-league boots. 
These boots, as you may well imagine, were of pro- 
digious size, and the giant himself was so big that 
when he left his order he sat outside on the pavement 



fm1515 




166 CHIMNEY-POT PAPERS 

and thrust his stockinged foot in through the window 
for the cobbler to get his measure. 

I was laughing heartily at this when I observed 
that a strange procession was passing by the cobbler's 
door. First there was a man who was burdened with 
a great tinsel box hung with velvet, in which were six 
plush chairs. After him came another who was 
smothered with rugs and pictures. A third carried 
upon his back his wife, a great fat creature, who 
glittered with jewels. Behind him he dragged a 
dozen trunks, from which dangled brocades and 
laces. This was all so absurd that in my mirth I 
missed what followed, but it seemed to be a long line 
of weary persons, each of whom staggered under the 
burden of an unworthy vanity. 

As I laughed the night came on — a dull hot night 
of summer. And in the shop I saw the cobbler on his 
bench, an old and wrinkled man like a dwarf in a 
fairy tale. There was a sign now above his door. 
"Boots for Runaways," it read. About its margin 
were pictures of many kinds of boots — a shoe of a 
child who runs to seek adventure, Atalanta's sandals, 
and sturdy boots that a man might wear. 

And now I saw a man coming in the dark with 
tired and drooping head. In both hands he clutched 
silver pieces that he had gathered in the day. When 
he was opposite the cobbler's shop, the great sign 
caught his eye. He wagged his head as one who 



BOOTS FOR RUNAWAYS 167 

comes upon the place he seeks. "Have you boots 
for me?" he asked, with his head thrust in the door. 

"For everyone who needs them," was the cobbler's 
answer. 

"My body is tired," the man replied, "and my soul 
is tired." 

"For what journey do you prepare?" the cobbler 
asked. 

The man looked ruefully at his hands which were 
still tightly clenched with silver pieces. 

"Getting and spending," said the cobbler slowly. 

"It has been my life." As the man spoke he banged 
with his elbow on his pocket and it rattled dully with 
metal. 

"Do /you want boots because you are a coward?" 
the cobbler asked. "If so, I have none to sell." 

"A coward?" the man answered, and he spoke 
deliberately as one in deep thought. "All my life 
I have been a coward, fearing that I might not keep 
even with my neighbors. Now, for the first time, I 
am brave." 

He kicked off his shoe and stretched out his foot. 
The cobbler took down from its nail his tape line and 
measured him. And the twilight deepened and the 
room grew dark. 

And the man went off cheerily. And with great 
strides he went into the windy North. But to the 
South in a slow procession, I saw those others who 
bore the weary burden of their wealth, staggering 



168 CHIMNEY-POT PAPERS 

beneath their load of dull possessions — their opera 
boxes, their money-chests and stables, their glittering 
houses, their trunks of silks and laces, and on their 
backs their fat wives shining in the night with jewels. 



On Hanging a Stocking at 
Christmas. 

As Christmas is, above all, a holiday for chil- 
dren, it is proper in its season to consider 
with what regard they hold its celebration. 
But as no one may really know the secrets of child- 
hood except as he retains the recollection of his own, 
it is therefore in the well of memory that I must dip 
my pen. The world has been running these many 
years with gathering speed like a great wheel upon 
a hill, and I must roll it backward to the heights to 
see how I fared on the night and day of Christmas. 

I can remember that for a month before the day 
I computed its distance, not only in hours and minutes 
but even in seconds, until the answer was scrawled 
across my slate. Now, when I multiply 24 x 60 x 60, 
the resulting 86,400 has an agreeable familiarity as 
the amount I struck oif each morning. At bedtime 
on Christmas Eve I had still 36,000 impatient sec- 
onds yet to wait, for I considered that Christmas 
really started at six o'clock in the morning. 

There was, of course, a lesser celebration on Christ- 
mas Eve when we hung our stockings. There were 
six of them, from mother's long one to father's short 
one. Ours, although built on womanish lines, lacked 
the greater length and they were, consequently, in- 



170 CHIMNEY-POT PAPERS 

ferior for the purpose of our greed; but father's were 
woefully short, as if fashioned to the measure of his 
small expectancy. Even a candy cane came peeping 
from the top, as if curiosity had stirred it to look 
around. 

Finally, when the stockings were hung on the 
knobs of the mantel, we went up the dark stairs to 
bed. At the landing we saw the last glimmer from 
the friendly sitting-room. The hall clock ticked 
solemnly in the shadow below with an air of firmness, 
as much as to say that it would not be hurried. Fret 
as we might, those 36,000 seconds were not to be 
jostled through the night. 

In the upper hall we looked from a window upon 
the snowy world. Perhaps we were too old to believe 
in Santa Claus, but even so, on this magic night might 
not a skeptic be at fault — might there not be a chance 
that the discarded world had returned to us? Once 
a year, surely, reason might nod and drowse. Per- 
haps if we put our noses on the cold glass and peered 
hard into the glittering darkness, we might see the 
old fellow himself, muffled to his chin in furs, going 
on his yearly errands. It was a jingling of sleigh 
bells on the street that started this agreeable sus- 
picion, but, alas, when the horse appeared, manifestly 
by his broken jogging gait he was only an earthly 
creature and could not have been trusted on the roof. 
Or the moon, sailing across the sky, invited the 
thought that tonight beyond the accustomed hour and 



HANGING A STOCKING AT CHRISTMAS 171 

for a purpose it would throw its light across the roofs 
to mark the chimneys. 

Presently mother called up from the hall below. 
Had we gone to bed? Reluctantly now we began to 
thumb the buttons. Off came our clothes, both shirts 
together tonight for better speed in dressing. And 
all the night pants and drawers hung as close neigh- 
bors, one within the other, with stockings dangling 
at the ends, for quick resumption. We slipped 
shivering into the cold sheets. Down below the bed, 
by special permission, stood the cook's clock, wound 
up tight for its explosion at six o'clock. 

Then came silence and the night. . . . 

Presently, all of a sudden, Brrr--! There arose a 
deafening racket in the room. Had the reindeer 
come afoul of the chimney? Had the loaded sleigh 
crashed upon the roof? Were pirates on the stairs? 
We awoke finally, and smothered the alarm in the 
pillows. A match ! The gas ! And now a thrill went 
through us. Although it was still as black as ink 
outside, at last the great day of all the year had come. 

It was, therefore, before the dawn that we stole 
downstairs in our stockings — dressed loosely and 
without too great precision in our hurry. Buttons 
that lay behind were neglected, nor did it fret us if a 
garment came on twisted. It was a rare tooth that 
felt the brush this morning, no matter how it was 
coddled through the year. 

We carried our shoes, but this was not entirely in 



172 CHIMNEY-POT PAPERS 

consideration for the sleeping house. Rather, our 
care proceeded from an enjoyment of our stealth; for 
to rise before the dawn when the lamps were still 
lighted on the street and issue in our stockings, was 
to taste adventure. It had not exactly the zest of 
burglary, although it was of kin: nor was it quite 
like the search for buried treasure which we played 
on common days: yet to slink along the hallway on 
a pitch-black Christmas morning, with shoes dangling 
by the strings, was to realize a height of happiness 
unequaled. 

Quietly we tiptoed down the stairs on whose steep 
rail we had so often slid in the common light of day, 
now so strangely altered by the shadows. Below in 
the hall the great clock ticked, loudly and with satis- 
faction that its careful count was done and its seconds 
all despatched. There was a gurgle in its throat 
before it struck the hour, as some folk clear their 
throats before they sing. 

As yet there was not a blink of day. The house 
was as black as if it practiced to be a cave, yet an 
instinct instructed us that now at least darkness was 
safe. There were frosty patterns on the windows of 
the sitting-room, familiar before only on our bedroom 
windows. Here in the sitting-room arose dim shapes 
which probably were its accustomed furniture, but 
which to our excited fancy might be sleds and veloci- 
pedes. 



HANGING A STOCKING AT CHRISTMAS 173 

We groped for a match. There was a splutter that 
showed red in the hollow of my brother's hand. 

After the first glad shock, it was our habit to rum- 
mage in the general midden outside our stockings. 
If there was a drum upon the heap, should not first 
a tune be played — softly lest it rouse the house? Or 
if a velocipede stood beside the fender, surely the 
restless creature chafed for exercise and must be 
ridden a few times around the room. Or perhaps a 
sled leaned against the chair (it but rested against 
the rigors of the coming day) and one should feel its 
runners to learn whether they are whole and round, 
for if flat and fixed with screws it is no better than a 
sled for girls with feet tucked up in front. On such 
a sled, no one trained to the fashions of the slide 
would deign to take a belly- slammer, for the larger 
boys would cry out with scorn and point their 
sneering mittens. 

The stocking was explored last. It was like a grab- 
bag, but glorified and raised to a more generous level. 
On meaner days shriveled grab-bags could be got at 
the corner for a penny — if such mild fortune fell your 
way — mere starvelings by comparison — and to this 
shop you had often trotted after school when learning 
sat heaviest on your soul. If a nickel had accrued to 
you from the sale of tintags, it was better, of course, 
to lay it out in pop; but with nothing better than a 
penny, there was need of sharp denial. How you 
lingered before the horehound jar! Coltsfoot, too, 



17 J,, CHIMNEY-POT PAPERS 

was but a penny to the stick and pleased the palate. 
Or one could do worse than licorice. But finally you 
settled on a grab-bag. You roused an old woman 
from her knitting behind the stove and demanded that 
a choice of grab-bags be placed before you. Then, 
like the bearded phrenologist at the side-show of the 
circus, you put your fingers on them to read their 
humps. Perhaps an all-day sucker lodged inside — 
a glassy or an agate — ^marbles best for pugging — or 
a brass ring with a ruby. 

Through the year these bags sufficed, but the 
Christmas stocking was a deeper and finer mystery. 
In the upper leg were handkerchiefs from grand- 
mother — whose thoughts ran prudentially on noses — 
mittens and a cap — useful presents of duller pur- 
pose — things that were due you anyway and would 
have come in the course of time. But down in the 
darker meshes of the stocking, when you had turned 
the corner of the heel, there were the sweet extras of 
life — a mouth-organ, a baseball, a compass and a 
watch. 

Some folk have a Christmas tree instead of hang- 
ing their stockings, but this is the preference of older 
folk rather than the preference of children. Such 
persons wish to observe a child's enjoyment, and this 
is denied them if the stocking is opened in the dawn. 
Under a pretense of instruction they sit in an absurd 
posture under the tree; but they do no more than 
read the rules and are blind to the obscurer uses of 



HANGING A STOCKING AT CHRISTMAS 175 

the toys. As they find occasion, the children run off 
and play in a quieter room with some old and broken 
toy. 

Who can interpret the desires of children? They 
are a race apart from us. At times, for a moment, 
we bring them to attention; then there is a scurry of 
feet and they are gone. Although they seem to sit 
at table with us, they are beyond a frontier that we 
cannot pass. Their words are ours, but applied to 
foreign uses. If we try to follow their truant 
thoughts, like the lame man of the story we limp be- 
hind a shooting star. We bestow on them a blind 
condescension, not knowing how their imagination 
outclimbs our own. And we cramp them with our 
barren learning. 

I assert, therefore, that it is better to find one's 
presents in the dawn, when there is freedom. In all 
the city, wherever there are lights, children have 
taken a start upon the day. Then, although the toys 
are strange, there is adventure in prying at their 
uses. If one commits a toy to a purpose undreamed 
of by its maker, it but rouses the invention to further 
discovery. Once on a dark and frosty Christmas 
morning, I spent a puzzling hour upon a coffee- 
grinder — a present to my mother — in a delusion that 
it was a rare engine destined for myself. It might 
have been a bank had it possessed a slot for coins. 
A little eagle surmounted the top, yet this was not a 
sufficient clue. The handle offered the hope that it 



176 CHIMNEY-POT PAPERS 

was a music-box, but although I turned it round and 
round, and noises issued from its body quite foreign 
to my other toys, yet I could not pronounce it music. 
With sails it might have been a windmill. I laid it on 
its side and stood it on its head without conclusion. 
It was painted red, and that gave it a wicked look, 
but no other villainy appeared. To this day as often 
as I pass a coffee-grinder in a grocer's shop I turn its 
handle in memory of my perplexing hour. And even 
if one remains unschooled to the uses of the toys, their 
discovery in the dawn while yet the world lies fast 
asleep, is far beyond their stale performance that rises 
with the sun. 

And yet I know of an occurrence, to me pathetic, 
that once attended such an early discovery. A dis- 
tant cousin of mine — a man really not related except 
by the close bond of my regard — ^was brought up 
many years ago by an uncle of austere and miserly 
nature. Such goodness as this uncle had once pos- 
sessed was cramped into a narrow and smothering 
piety. He would have dimmed the sun upon the 
Sabbath, could he have reached up tall enough. He 
had no love in his heart, nor mirth. My cousin has 
always loved a horse and even in his childhood this 
love was strong. And so, during the days that led up 
to Christmas when children speculate upon their de- 
sires and check them on their fingers, he kept asking 
his uncle for a pony. At first, as you might know, 
his uncle was stolid against the thought, but finally, 



HANGING A STOCKING AT CHRISTMAS 177 

with many winks and nods — pleasantries beyond his 
usual habit — he assented. 

Therefore in the early darkness of the day, the 
child came down to find his gift. First, probably, he 
went to the stable and climbing on the fence he looked 
through the windows for an unaccustomed form inside 
the stalls. Next he looked to see whether the pony 
might be hitched to the post in front of the house, in 
the manner of the family doctor. The search failing 
and being now somewhat disturbed with doubt, he 
entered his nursery on the slim chance that the pony 
might be there. The room was dark and he listened 
on the sill, if he might hear him whinny. Feeling his 
way along the hearth he came on nothing greater than 
his stocking which was tied to the andiron. It bulged 
and stirred his curiosity. He thrust in his hand and 
coming on something sticky, he put his fingers in his 
mouth. They were of a delightful sweetness. He 
now paused in his search for the pony and drawing 
out a huge lump of candy he applied himself. But 
the day was near and he had finished no more than 
half, when a ray of light permitted him to see what 
he ate. It was a candy horse — making good the 
promise of his uncle. This and a Testament had 
been stuffed inside his stocking. The Testament was 
wrapped in tissue, but the horse was bitten to the 
middle. It had been at best but a poor substitute 
for what he wanted, yet his love was so broad that 
it included even a sugar horse; and this, alas, he had 



178 CHIMNEY-POT PAPERS 

consumed unknowing in the dark. And even now 
when the dear fellow tells the story after these many- 
years have passed, and comes to the sober end with 
the child crying in the twilight of the morning, I 
realize as not before that there should be no Christ- 
mas kept unless it be with love and mirth. 

It was but habit that we hung our stockings at the 
chimney — ^the piano would have done as well — for I 
retain but the slightest memory of a belief in Santa 
Claus: perhaps at most, as I have hinted, a far-off 
haze of wonder while looking through the window 
upon the snowy sky — at night a fancied clatter 
on the roof, if I lay awake. And therefore in a 
chimney there was no greater mystery than was in- 
herent in any hole that went off suspiciously in the 
dark. There was a fearful cave beneath the steps 
that mounted from the rear to the front garret. This 
was wrapped in Cimmerian darkness — ^which is the 
strongest pigment known — and it extended from its 
mouth beyond the furthest stretch of leg. To the 
disillusioned, indeed, this cave was harmless, for it 
merely offset the lower ceiling of the bathroom below ; 
yet to us it was a cave unparalleled. Little by 
little we ventured in, until in time we could sit on 
the snug joists inside with the comfortable feeling of 
pirates. Presently we hit on the device of hanging 
a row of shining maple-syrup tins along the wall out- 
side where they were caught by the dusty sunlight, 
which was thus reflected in on us. By the light of 



HANGING A STOCKING AT CHRISTMAS 179 

these dim moons the cave showed itself to be the size 
of a library table. And here, also, we crouched on 
dark and cloudy days when the tins were in eclipse, 
and found a dreadful joy when the wind scratched 
upon the roof. 

In the basement, also, there was a central hall that 
disappeared forever under an accumulation of porch 
chairs and lumber. Here was no light except what 
came around two turns from the laundry. Even 
Annie the cook, a bold venturesome person, had 
never quite penetrated to a full discovery of this hall- 
way. A proper approach into the darkness was on 
hands and knees, and yet there were barrels and 
boxes to overcome. Therefore, as we were bred to 
these broader discoveries, a mere chimney in the 
sitting-room, which arose safely from the fenders, was 
but a mild and pleasant tunnel to the roof. 

And if a child believes in Santa Claus and chim- 
neys, and that his presents are stored in a glittering 
kingdom across the wintry hills, he will miss the finer 
pleasure of knowing that they are hidden somewhere 
in his own house. For myself, I would not willingly 
forego certain dizzy ascents to the topmost shelves of 
the storeroom, where, with my head close under the 
ceiling and my foot braced against the wall, I have 
examined suspicious packages that came into the 
house by stealth. As likely as not, at the ringing of 
the door-bell, we had been whisked into a back room. 
Presently there was a foot sounding on the stairs and 



180 CHIMNEY-POT PAPERS 

across the ceiling. Then we were released. But 
something had arrived. 

Thereafter we found excitement in rummaging in 
unlikely places — a wary lifting of summer garments 
laid away, for a peek beneath — a journey on one's 
stomach under the spare-room bed — a pilgrimage 
around the cellar with a flaring candle — furtive 
explorations of the storeroom. And when we came to 
a door that was locked — ^Aha! Here was a puzzle 
and a problem! We tried every key in the house, 
right side up and upside down. Bluebeard's wife, 
poor creature, — if I read the tale aright, — was merely 
seeking her Christmas presents around the house 
before the proper day. 

The children of a friend of mine, however, have 
been brought up to a belief in Santa Claus, and on 
Christmas Eve they have the pretty custom of filling 
their shoes with crackers and scraps of bread by way 
of fodder for the reindeer. When the shoes are found 
empty in the morning, but with crumbs about — as 
though the hungry reindeer spilled them in their 
haste — it fixes the deception. 

But if one must have a Christmas tree, I recom- 
mend the habit of some friends of mine. In front of 
their home, down near the fence, is a trim little cedar. 

T connects this with electric wires and hangs 

on it gayly colored lamps. Every night for a week, 
until the new year, these lights shine across the snow 
and are the delight of travelers on the road. The 



HANGING A STOCKING AT CHRISTMAS 181 

Christmas stars, it seems, for this hallowed season 
have come to earth. 

We gave the family dinner. On my mother fell 
the extra labor, but we took the general credit. All 
the morning the relatives arrived — ^thin and fat. But 
if one of them bore a package or if his pockets sagged, 
we showed him an excessive welcome. Sometimes 
there was a present boxed and wrapped to a mighty 
bulk. From this we threw off thirty papers and the 
bundle dwindled, still no gift appeared. In this lay 
the sweetness of the jest, for finally, when the con- 
tents were shriveled to a kernel, in the very heart of 
it there lay a bright penny or common marble. 

All this time certain savory whiffs have been blow- 
ing from the kitchen. Twice at least my mother has 
put her head in at the door to count the relatives. 
And now when the clock on the mantel strikes two — 
a bronze Lincoln deliberating forever whether he will 
sign the Emancipation Bill — the dining-room door 
is opened. 

The table was drawn out to prodigious length and 
was obliquely set across the room. As early as yes- 
terday the extra leaves had been brought from the 
pantry, and we had all taken part in fitting them 
together. Not to disturb the larger preparation, our 
supper and breakfast had been served in the kitchen. 
And even now to eat in the kitchen, if the table is 
set before the window and there is a flurry of snow 



182 CHIMNEY-POT PAPERS 

outside, is to feel pleasantly the proximity of a great 
occasion. 

The Christmas table was so long and there were 
so many of us, that a few of the chairs were caught 
in a jog of the wall and had no proper approach ex- 
cept by crawling on hands and knees beneath it. Each 
year it was customary to request my maiden aunt, a 
prim lady who bordered on seventy and had limbs 
instead of legs, to undertake the passage. Each year 
we listened for the jest and shouted with joy when 
the request was made. There were other jests, too, 
that were dear to us and grew better with the years. 
My aunt was reproved for boisterous conduct, and 
although she sat as silent as a mouse, she was always 
warned against the cider. Each year, also, as soon 
as the dessert appeared, there was a demand that a 
certain older cousin tell the Judge West story. But 
the jest lay in the demand instead of in the story, for 
although there was a clamor of applause, the story 
was never told and it teases me forever. Then another 
cousin, who journeyed sometimes to New York, 
usually instructed us in the latest manner of eating 
an orange in the metropolis. But we disregarded his 
fashionable instruction, and peeled ours round and 
round. 

The dinner itself was a prodigious feast. The cook- 
stove must have rested and panted for a week there- 
after. Before long, Annie got so red bringing in 
turkeys and cranberry sauce — countless plates heaped 



HANGING A STOCKING AT CHRISTMAS 183 

and toppling with vegetables and meats — that one 
might think she herself was in process to become a 
pickled beet and would presently enter on a platter. 

In the afternoon we rested, but at night there was 
a dance, for which my maiden aunt played the piano. 
The dear good soul, whose old brown fingers were 
none too limber, had skill that scarcely mounted to 
the speed of a polka, but she was steady at a waltz. 
There was one tune — ^bink a bunk bunk, bink a bunk 
bunk — that went around and around with an agree- 
able monotony even when the player nodded. There 
was a legend in the family that once she fell asleep in 
the performance, and that the dancers turned down 
the lights and left the room; to her amazement when 
presently she awoke, for she thought she had outsat 
the party. 

My brother and I had not advanced to the trick 
of dancing and we built up our blocks in the corner 
of the room in order that the friskier dancers might 
kick them over as they passed. Chief in the perform- 
ance was the Judge West cousin who, although 
whiskered almost into middle age, had a merry heart 
and knew how to play with children. Sometimes, by 
consent, we younger fry sat beneath the piano, which 
was of an old square pattern, and worked the pedals 
for my aunt, in order that her industry might be un- 
divided on the keys. It is amazing what a variety 
we could cast upon the waltz, now giving it a muffled 



ISJi, 



CHIMNEY-POT PAPERS 



sound, and presently offering the dancers a prolonged 
roaring. 

Midway in the evening, when the atrocities of 
dinner were but mildly remembered, ice-cream was 
brought in. It was not hard as at dinner, but had 
settled to a delicious softness, and could be mushed 
upon a spoon. Then while the party again proceeded, 
and my aunt resumed her waltz, we were despatched 
upstairs. 

On the bed lay our stockings, still tied with string, 
that had been stuffed with presents in the dawn. But 
the morning had now sunk into immeasurable dis- 
tance and seemed as remote as Job himself. And all 
through the evening, as we lay abed and listened to 
the droning piano below, we felt a spiritual hoUow- 
ness because the great day had passed. 




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